The Road to MESAhttp://stanfordpress.typepad.com/blog/2016/11/the-road-to-mesa.html
Rethinking the history of area studies in the United States.<p class="blog-tagline">Rethinking the history of area studies in the United States.</p>
<p class="author-byline">by ZACHARY LOCKMAN</p>
<p><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c8b07aae970b-pi"><img class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c8b07aae970b img-responsive" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="MESA" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c8b07aae970b-800wi" alt="MESA" border="0" /></a></p>
<p>The annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) that opens this week will celebrate the organization’s fiftieth anniversary. That makes it a good time to take a new look at the history of Middle East studies as an academic field, and more broadly at the historical trajectory of area studies in the United States.</p>
<p>Most accounts of the emergence of area studies as a distinct set of academic fields embodied in a range of institutions (centers, departments, faculty lines, graduate programs, academic associations, scholarly journals, funding streams, fellowship programs for training and research, and so on) treat this phenomenon as largely or exclusively a product of the Cold War and of the needs of the U.S. national security state to which it gave birth. But my research suggests that postwar area studies actually had significant roots in developments in the U.S. academic and foundation worlds during the interwar period. These included efforts from the late 1920s onward, orchestrated mainly by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, to promote and modernize the study of the world beyond the United States and Western Europe, develop more effective modes of language training and overcome what were widely perceived as excessively rigid disciplinary boundaries—themselves a product of the reorganization of U.S. academia along disciplinary lines in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.</p>
<p class="large-quote">It was the unprecedented munificence of the big foundations, and not government funding, that made area studies into a relatively well-established and durable component of U.S. higher education.</p>
<p><br />During the Second World War the new institutions, networks, pedagogical practices and emerging visions of knowledge production that these prewar initiatives had begun to generate were drawn upon, remolded and drastically expanded in order to meet the urgent needs of the U.S. government and military for useful knowledge about peoples, places and issues around the globe deemed critical to the war effort. In this hothouse atmosphere a new set of sites and practices emerged that sought to produce concrete, interdisciplinary knowledge about particular regions, locales, cultures and issues, along with accelerated methods of training in languages of which very few Americans had previously had any knowledge. Relatively early in the war, and well before anyone could have imagined that the postwar period would be characterized by a decades-long global confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, academic leaders at the ACLS and at its sister organization (and sometime competitor) the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) had begun to formulate what they regarded as a new and efficacious vision of interdisciplinary, regionally focused knowledge production and to argue that it should become a permanent component of postwar higher education in the United States.</p>
<p>Key officials at these organizations’ main funders, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation, quickly embraced this vision and used the abundant means at their disposal to turn it into reality shortly after the war ended by providing the funds with which to launch the first area studies centers, along with new funding streams to support research and training. By the end of 1946 Rockefeller Foundation funding had made possible the establishment of Columbia University’s Russian Institute as well as new programs in “Far Eastern” (what we today call East Asian) and Russian studies at other universities. The Carnegie Corporation soon followed suit by allocating millions of dollars for the establishment and support of area studies centers at universities across the country, along with a new national research fellowship program.</p>
<p class="pull-quote">Wartime and early postwar promoters of area studies were often as focused on visions of advancing and transforming the social sciences and humanities as they were on national security.</p>
<p>That so many of the new foundation-funded area studies centers and programs focused on the Soviet Union, China and Japan was of course no coincidence: by 1947 what had already begun to be referred to as the Cold War was under way, and foundation, university, and government officials certainly hoped that the new area studies fields would produce knowledge (and students) to serve national security. But while it is clear that the launching of area studies in the immediate postwar years was inflected by contemporary geostrategic concerns, I argue that it cannot be reduced to them. Academic and foundation leaders had since the interwar years been grappling with some of the intellectual problems that would later feed into the formulation of a rationale for area studies as an apparently promising new mode for the production and dissemination of knowledge; at the same time, wartime and early postwar promoters of area studies were often as focused on visions of advancing and transforming the social sciences and humanities as they were on national security. In any case, much—perhaps most—of the scholarly work which came out of area studies fields over succeeding decades had little or nothing to do with national security or with policymaking.</p>
<p>In the late 1940s Middle East studies was generally regarded as among the less developed of the area studies fields. Grants from both Rockefeller and Carnegie made possible the establishment, in 1947, of what was touted as the country’s first area studies program focused on the Middle East, at Princeton. But the foundations and the SSRC were from the start skeptical that Near Eastern studies at Princeton could overcome its philological and classical legacies and develop what they had by now come to regard as a proper area studies program for the Middle East, which in their view entailed focusing on the modern and contemporary periods and on social science research. So while they would continue to give Princeton substantial grants in the years that followed, these two foundations (joined in the mid-1950s by the even wealthier Ford Foundation) also sought to develop alternatives. They funded new Middle East programs at the University of Michigan and Columbia; from the mid-1950s onward they pumped large sums into Harvard’s new Center for Middle Eastern Studies; and they supported a number of new and existing centers at other (largely elite) private and public universities in the United States, along with McGill University’s new Institute of Islamic Studies. Other area studies fields experienced similar developments.</p>
<p>It was thus the unprecedented munificence of the big foundations, and not government funding, that made area studies into a relatively well-established and durable component of U.S. higher education in the decade and a half after the end of the Second World War. In fact, it was only with the passage in 1958 of the National Defense Education Act that federal funding began to flow into area studies, to support centers, programming and faculty positions as well as graduate fellowships for language training. Existing area studies centers quickly secured their share of the new funding stream that Title VI of the act provided, but it also made possible the establishment of new area studies centers, often at public universities, which had not benefited from the foundations’ largesse. By 1968 twelve Title VI-supported Middle East centers were in operation, with about 300 affiliated faculty and some 8,000 students enrolled in language and area courses, in addition to several other centers which did not receive Title VI funding.</p>
<p class="large-quote">The rapid expansion of Middle East studies in the late 1950s and early 1960s, propelled by this large-scale infusion of foundation and government funding, led to growing interest in some form of organization for the field.</p>
<p><br />The rapid expansion of Middle East studies in the late 1950s and early 1960s, propelled by this large-scale infusion of foundation and government funding, led to growing interest in some form of organization for the field. Many of the other area studies fields had established national associations earlier: the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) had originated as the Far Eastern Association in 1941, the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies had been established in 1948, the African Studies Association had been founded in 1957, and by the early 1960s there was much discussion about establishing a national association for Latin American studies. In 1961 the (mainly Ford-funded) ACLS/SSRC Joint Committee on the Near and Middle East (JCNME), whose origins go back to 1951 and which was the main vehicle for field-building in Middle East studies, established an ad hoc committee to explore the question of organizing the field, either under the auspices of an existing association or independently. There was vehement opposition to working with the American Oriental Society and negotiations with the AAS proved fruitless, but there was also doubt that Middle East studies could sustain an association of its own; so little progress was made for some years.</p>
<div id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb0953774b970d" class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb0953774b970d photo-full " style="float: left; margin: 15px 25px 10px 0px; width: 200px;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=26587"><img class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb0953774b970d img-responsive" title="Field Notes" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01bb0953774b970d-800wi" alt="Field Notes" border="0" /></a>
<div id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb0953774b970d" class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb0953774b970d"><span style="color: #b9b9b9;"><a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=26587"><em>Field Notes</em> »</a>&nbsp;traces the origins and trajectory of area studies in the United States.</span></div>
</div>
<p>Pressure for action continued to build, however, perhaps especially among younger social scientists and historians who focused on the modern or contemporary Middle East and who had begun their academic careers in the late 1950s or early 1960s; they had come to feel that the field was now sufficiently large and stable to make the establishment of a professional organization for it both feasible and necessary. They were also well aware that many of the other area studies fields had already established associations to serve their interests, making Middle East studies something of an outlier by that point. Finally, in 1966, soon after the establishment of the Latin American Studies Association, Princeton sociologist and JCNME chair Morroe Berger responded to demands for action by convincing his committee to convene a conference that would lay the foundations of a new national membership association for Middle East studies. That conference led to a second (invitation-only) meeting in December 1966, held at the offices of the SSRC, at which MESA was formally established. A dose of Ford Foundation funding early on helped get MESA up and running, and it was able to hold its first annual meeting a year after its founding and not long thereafter launch its own scholarly journal.</p>
<p>There is obviously much more to the story, of Middle East studies and of area studies more broadly. But the point I want to drive home is that we need to pay close attention to the institutional visions and decision-making that shaped these new fields, but also to refrain from treating them (and the knowledge they produced) simply as epiphenomena of the Cold War. The trajectories of area studies (and of Middle East studies) in North America were shaped by many contingencies and much contention, and the histories of these fields have been replete with unrealized visions and unanticipated consequences. Certainly neither Middle East studies nor the other area studies fields developed along the lines that their early advocates and leaders imagined they would; nor has most of the knowledge they produced, and continue to produce, served to further American global hegemony in any obvious way.</p>
<p class="following-excerpt">A version of this post appeared originally in <em><a href="http://mesana.org/publications/imes/index.html">Issues in Middle East Studies</a></em>, a publication produced by the Middle East Studies Association.</p>
<p class="start-reading"><a href="http://www.sup.org/books/extra/?id=26587&amp;i=Preface.html">Start reading <em>Field Notes</em> »</a></p>
<p>Zachary Lockman is Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies and of History at New York University. He is the author of multiple books including, most recently, <em><a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=26587">Field Notes: The Making of Middle East Studies in the United States</a></em>, which traces the origins and trajectory of area studies in the United States.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>Middle East StudiesStanford University Press2016-11-18T05:00:00-08:00The Political Stakes of Anthropologyhttp://stanfordpress.typepad.com/blog/2016/11/the-political-stakes-of-anthropology.html
Studying the Middle East at the height of US empire reveals the politics of academia.<p class="blog-tagline">Studying the Middle East at the height of US empire reveals the politics of academia.</p>
<p class="author-byline">by LARA DEEB and JESSICA WINEGAR</p>
<div class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb0953e9c9970d photo-full " id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb0953e9c9970d" style="display: inline-block;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01bb0953e9c9970d-pi"><img alt="BDS" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb0953e9c9970d image-full img-responsive" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01bb0953e9c9970d-800wi" title="BDS" /></a>
<div class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb0953e9c9970d" id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb0953e9c9970d"><span style="color: #b9b9b9;">Supporters of academic boycott during the annual business meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Denver, Colorado, November 21, 2015. Photo by Alex Shams.</span></div>
</div>
<p>The consummate image of the scholarly life is that it is defined by the free and impassioned pursuit of ideas. We conduct research and we teach; we produce, question, and impart knowledge. Yet all of us working in colleges and universities know that the life on which we once, perhaps naively, embarked is also filled with politics, much of it quite fraught. Perhaps nowhere is this more salient today than in the field of Middle East studies. In particular, anthropological study focused on this region provides a compelling lens through which to view some of the key stakes in the political struggles of academe and their relation to broader structures of power—particularly as the region has taken center stage in US imperial ambitions.</p>
<p class="pull-quote">US global engagements in the Middle East and North Africa has for decades influenced how and why people research and teach about the region.</p>
<p>Those ambitions have, on the one hand, precipitated significantly more interest in funding work on the region and hiring scholars to research and teach about it. On the other hand, since at least the 1970s, academics who research or teach topics against the grain of dominant US national narratives about and interests in the region have faced the prospects of not having their research funded, not being hired, being accused—by parents, students, administrators, and people unassociated with academe or their campus—of bias and even treason in their teaching and public lectures, being targeted by blacklists and hate mail, and even losing their jobs.</p>
<p>A number of factors have contributed to this charged environment in Middle East Studies. For one, recent decades have seen a massive influx of women and region-related scholars into the field, a demographic shift that has altered the field in fundamental ways. The increasing diversity of scholarly voices has often resulted in the foregrounding of serious critiques of the social inequalities based on race, gender, religion, and national heritage, as well as US empire, Israeli occupation of Palestine, and the inherently subjective nature of knowledge production. These emergent boundary-pushing perspectives also dovetail with an academic climate that increasingly relies on tuition dollars and donations to support its operations—institutional funding that is secured by currying favor with boards of trustees, students, and alumni, who consequently have greater power over what gets taught, how, and by whom.</p>
<p>This economic reality—the increasingly corporate ethos of higher education and the scarcity of tenure-track faculty positions—has meant that in order to get and keep good jobs, academics need to (or strongly feel they need to) shape their scholarly activities in ways that meet market demands without rocking any boats. The unhiring of Steven Salaita is perhaps the most famous point-in-case of recent memory: When, during Israel’s 2014 assault on Gaza, Salaita issued a series of tweets critical of Israel, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign responded by rescinding its job offer to him. Region-related scholars, like Salaita, must in particular constantly fight stereotypes of being un-American or anti-Semitic and are subject to greater monitoring than other scholars—dynamics which are directly related to and shaped by US foreign policy.</p>
<p>US global engagements in the Middle East and North Africa has for decades influenced how and why people research and teach about the region—it also determines which issues scholars might experience as too risky to confront. While US involvement in the region has drawn people to study it, it has also created political minefields that pressure scholars to conform to normative US perspectives on the region. For anthropologists in particular, specific events within this long history of US political engagement have affected scholars’ access to research sites. For example, the 1978-79 Iranian Revolution against a US-backed dictator essentially prohibited generations of US scholars—with a window of exception for Iranian Americans—from doing research there. And Iran is far from an isolated example: Over the course of the past few decades travel bans and other impediments to access have been implemented on Beirut, Libya, Afghanistan, Algeria, and Iraq all as a result of US foreign policy objectives. Most recently, Syria has become a black box for contemporary ethnographic research, first due to problems obtaining research permission and engaging ethically with interlocutors under the Asad regimes and now also due to war.</p>
<p class="large-quote">Federal research funding has always reflected national security and political concerns, and policymakers have used resulting knowledge to their own ends.</p>
<p><br />On the other hand, the presence of US diplomatic ties and/or economic aid to a country has eased access in some places, as these relationships carry with them both stated and unstated obligations to grant visas and permissions to researchers carrying US passports. Yemen’s popularity for many years, including during the Cold War, was at least partly due to the fact that it was, in the words of a Yemen scholar’s mentor at the time, “beholden to the U.S. government because of all the foreign aid given to them” and therefore accessible to US researchers. While US scholars had great difficulty doing fieldwork in Egypt during the Nasser period (particularly after 1967), it became the most popular fieldsite in the Middle East and North Africa after the Camp David Accords in 1978 and subsequent aid from the United States. The 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization, meanwhile, enabled a critical mass of scholars to conduct research in the occupied Palestinian territories for a time. Generally decent diplomatic relations with Morocco, Turkey, Jordan, and some Gulf countries have also facilitated access to fieldsites in those countries.</p>
<div class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d23a2b61970c photo-full " id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d23a2b61970c" style="float: left; margin: 15px 25px 10px 0px; width: 202px;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=22055"><img alt="Anthropology&#39;s Politics" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d23a2b61970c img-responsive" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d23a2b61970c-800wi" style="border: 1px solid #888888;" title="Anthropology&#39;s Politics" /></a>
<div class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d23a2b61970c" id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d23a2b61970c"><span style="color: #b9b9b9;"><a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=22055"><em>Anthropology&#39;s Politics</em> »</a>&#0160;offers a complex portrait of how academic politics hinders education and limits the public&#39;s access to critical knowledge about the Middle East.</span></div>
</div>
<p>The events that instigated ebbs and flows in fieldsite access not only motivated scholarly interest in working in specific parts of the region but also molded the content of that interest as it evolved through academic careers. Violence in particular created and cemented stereotypes of Middle Easterners, especially men, as terrorists, which anthropologists then sought to complicate, if not outright combat, drawing on both their knowledge that miniscule numbers of Middle Easterners actually engaged in violence against Western or Israeli interests and their knowledge that US and Israeli aggression in the region was concealed from public view and whitewashed as a possible motive for such violence.</p>
<p>The War on Terror exacerbated these narratives but also presented another troubling tension. Federal research funding has always reflected national security and political concerns, and policymakers have used resulting knowledge to their own ends. But the twenty-first century brought new government efforts to use funding to shape scholars’ research topics and frameworks. For example, a number of grants and other funds were made available to students and researchers in exchange for their commitment to put their skills to use in the service of national security interests in some manner. This “strings-attached” funding model reflects the ways that global politics have intertwined with the university’s corporatization to create instrumental, and sometimes militarized, academic interest in the region.</p>
<p>Studying the contemporary Middle East during the apogee of US empire reveals the politics of academia in myriad ways. The academic environment is utterly entangled with trends in US domestic and foreign policy, the result being that the pursuit of ideas—that hallmark of scholarly practice—is never pure; it is infused with tensions large and small. This is not to say that the lofty ideals of higher education have grown more tainted over time (surely the halls of medieval universities were host to many political machinations). Instead, it is to bring a key insight of post-WWII humanities and social science research—that knowledge and power are coconstituted—to bear not just on the scholarship we produce, but on <em>how </em>we produce it.</p>
<p class="following-excerpt">This post has been adapted from <a href="http://sup.org/books/title/?id=22055"><em>Anthropology’s Politics</em></a> by Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar.</p>
<p class="start-reading"><a href="http://sup.org/books/extra/?id=22055&amp;i=Excerpt%20from%20the%20Introduction.html">Start reading <em>Anthropology’s Politics</em> »</a></p>
<p class="start-reading">&#0160;</p>
<p class="author-bio">Lara Deeb is Professor of Anthropology at Scripps college and co-author of <a href="http://sup.org/books/title/?id=22055"><em>Anthropology’s Politics: Disciplining the Middle East</em></a>.</p>
<p class="author-bio">Jessica Winegar is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Northwestern University and co-author of <a href="http://sup.org/books/title/?id=22055"><em>Anthropology’s Politics: Disciplining the Middle East</em></a></p>AnthropologyMiddle East StudiesStanford University Press2016-11-17T05:30:00-08:00Reading the Middle Easthttp://stanfordpress.typepad.com/blog/2016/11/reading-the-middle-east.html
Cultivating textual literacy in the classroom challenges dominant narratives around the region.<p class="blog-tagline">Cultivating textual literacy in the classroom challenges dominant narratives around the region.</p>
<p class="author-byline">by BETTY S. ANDERSON</p>
<div id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb0951aae8970d" class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb0951aae8970d photo-full " style="display: inline-block;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01bb0951aae8970d-pi"><img class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb0951aae8970d image-full img-responsive" title="Middle East" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01bb0951aae8970d-800wi" alt="Middle East" border="0" /></a>
<div id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb0951aae8970d" class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb0951aae8970d"><span style="color: #b9b9b9;">Public domain <a href="https://pixabay.com/en/syria-middle-east-map-globe-iraq-1034467/">via Pixabay</a>.</span></div>
</div>
<p>At almost any moment of the day, images and headlines from and about the Middle East bombard us: battle scenes from Aleppo and Mosul; characters on NCIS tasked with debating the nature of Islam as the detectives simultaneously hunt down a Muslim terrorist; Facebook friends posting news articles about the status of Middle Eastern women; beheadings in Saudi Arabia; Miranda expounding on the “niqwab” (yes, that’s how she pronounced the word) in <em>Sex and the City 2</em>; refugees being rescued en route to Europe; rallies in support of victims in Paris and Orlando; trailers for <em>American Sniper</em> and <em>Zero Dark Thirty</em>; and on and on. These images and messages come through as fragments, mostly passively imbibed, often broadcast to attract support for a show or a film or a politician, with the Middle East merely acting as a convenient tool to tell a story relevant only to America. However, these fragments collectively construct a cohesive narrative of a region defined by faith, wracked with conflict, seething with female oppression, dangerous to us, and requiring our salvation. Harking back to Edward Said and <em><a href="http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/159783/orientalism-by-edward-w-said/9780394740676/">Orientalism</a></em>, it is a place away from here but imagined primarily through our own society’s lens. &nbsp;</p>
<p class="large-quote">Images and headlines from and about the Middle East bombard us. These fragments collectively construct a cohesive narrative of a region defined by faith, wracked with conflict, seething with female oppression, dangerous to us, and requiring our salvation.</p>
<p><br />Is any of this radically new? At its core, no. As Melani McAlister and others have written in the Said vein, the narrative of the Middle East produced by Americans has frequently addressed America’s concerns above all else. American missionary work in Lebanon and Egypt gave credence to the view of America, a City on the Hill, a bastion of religious reform and new opportunities. “Garden of Allah” displays in late 19<span style="font-size: 11.6667px;">th</span>&nbsp;century department stores sold the exotic Orient as a pathway for women wishing to escape the confines of American Victorianism. The difference between then and now, I believe, is about degree given the proliferation of venues available to disseminate these narrative elements. The reality is that the proliferation of sources on the Middle East has changed the way I need to teach the topic within the classroom.</p>
<p>When I first began teaching in the 1990s, students knew little about the Middle East and my job was to offer up a world of the unknown. After 9/11 students came to class with a lot of information but of a superficial variety; in those years, I had to spend a good deal of time on the unlearning process before learning could take place. Now, I find that the massive quantity of information disseminated has made the unlearning process unmanageable. I face what I have come to call “default positions” in the classroom. By this I mean that students see the films and TV shows, hear the news broadcasts, and listen to the political candidates and despite their fragmentary nature the cohesiveness of the message steers students into pathways for conceptualizing how “we” see the Middle East and its people. I try to cut across those defaults in the classroom and our discussions cut against that grain but those messages and images never cease. The American-Middle East image machine has far more power than I can counteract and I see its narrative reemerge in papers and exams throughout the semester.</p>
<p class="large-quote">When I first began teaching in the 1990s, students knew little about the Middle East and my job was to offer up a world of the unknown. After 9/11 students came to class with a lot of information but of a superficial variety.</p>
<p><br />New and newly invigorated disciplines such as Security Studies and Histories of War and Diplomacy tap into the student desire to know how “we” have become embroiled in and endangered by such a place. These fields are all worthy of study because of the reality of contemporary relations between the Middle East and America and they are clearly attracting students, as evidenced by their large enrollments and the excitement evinced by students for such inquiry. They are not merely tapping into the newest sexy trends; associated scholars have written monographs and policy papers to establish the research and analytical methodologies for these approaches. Furthermore, the American liberal education system thrives on competing pedagogical paradigms in the academic and classroom realms. Nonetheless, I am frustrated because these fields have so successfully enveloped categories of analysis—such as gender, labor, politics, education, and the media—under the umbrella of security that it has made it difficult to convince students that topics—such as gender, labor, politics, education and the media—have validity outside the security and American frame. I have to entice students to be curious about how gender or labor or education are fascinating topics in their own right.</p>
<p>I have been experimenting with a host of methods to attract student interest and to re-validate alternative frames. I tried in my book, <em><a href="http://sup.org/books/title/?id=21652">A History of the Modern Middle East</a></em> to use rulers, rebels, and rogues as intertwined actors. My goal from the beginning was to integrate both the large and small political players into the narrative of Middle Eastern history, to complicate how the governors and the governed have interacted throughout history. Political leaders never completely governed separately from the peoples under their control; nongovernmental actors could not ignore the state institutions in their lives. I return century to century, decade to decade, to the actions and ideological positions proffered by monarchs and presidents, and also by slaves, religious clerics, provincial notables, urban merchants, students, professionals, workers, peasants, and army officers as examples of how rulers, rebels, and rogues forged Middle Eastern history together. The story takes place almost exclusively within the geography of the Middle East.</p>
<div id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c8aeac3c970b" class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c8aeac3c970b photo-full " style="float: left; margin: 15px 25px 10px 0px; width: 210px;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://sup.org/books/title/?id=21652"><img class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c8aeac3c970b img-responsive" title="A History of the Modern Middle East" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c8aeac3c970b-800wi" alt="A History of the Modern Middle East" border="0" /></a>
<div id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c8aeac3c970b" class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c8aeac3c970b"><span style="color: #b9b9b9;"><a href="http://sup.org/books/title/?id=21652"><em>A History of the Modern Middle East</em> »</a> offers a comprehensive account of the region from the Ottoman and Safavid empires to the present-day upheaval.</span></div>
</div>
<p>In other efforts, I spend a lot of time showing students how to effectively critique the many images and frames presented to them so they can analyze the power that underlies their production. To teach this point, I often discuss the Middle East as an access point for understanding how our perceptions and knowledge about a place can be guided by a plethora of seemingly disparate sources. When presented with images and texts, I find that students initially hone in on whether the information conveyed in the source is right or wrong, with little consideration for why it is vitally important to identify authors, potential audiences and socio-historical contexts as a precursor to examining content. For example, Instagram and Twitter messages appear to be relating on-the-ground reports of events in Syria and Iraq—and many are—but they could just as easily be produced by Washington, DC PR firms paid for by the Saudi government. Scenes from American films, Palestinian hip-hop videos, and images of architectural monuments throughout the region can become avenues for exploring representations of authority, rebellion, and artistic accomplishment.</p>
<p>Again, this is not new. We as teachers have always told students to engage texts critically; students are supposed to learn how to think independently while in college. I am returning to this old-fashioned process of deep textual analysis because so many sources inundate the students that they easily read them as white noise, reinforcing narrowly drawn representations of the Middle East. I can’t stop the texts from being disseminated and the region will no doubt be a continuing wellspring for such production, but I can encourage my students to keep a critical eye open over all available sources. Recognizing the importance of this action, I hope, will make them more judicious consumers of the images and texts that surround them. Understanding that the agency behind the image should be interrogated is also a valuable tool for making sense of the many different methodologies taught in the classroom as well.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p class="start-reading"><a href="http://sup.org/books/extra/?id=21652&amp;i=Preface.html">Start reading <em>A History of the Modern Middle East</em> »</a></p>
<p class="author-bio">&nbsp;</p>
<p class="author-bio">Betty S. Anderson is Associate Professor of Middle East History at Boston University and author of <em><a href="http://sup.org/books/title/?id=21652">A History of the Modern Middle East: Rulers, Rebels, and Rogues</a>.</em></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>Middle East StudiesStanford University Press2016-11-16T03:10:24-08:00Militarization and Multicultural Rightshttp://stanfordpress.typepad.com/blog/2016/11/militarization-and-multicultural-rights.html
U.S. intervention in Nicaragua has had lasting consequences for Afrodescendants.<p class="blog-tagline">U.S. intervention in Nicaragua has had lasting consequences for Afrodescendants.</p>
<p class="author-byline">by JENNIFER GOETT</p>
<div class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09503c1f970d photo-full " id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09503c1f970d" style="display: inline-block;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09503c1f970d-pi"><img alt="Miembros de la Contra" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09503c1f970d image-full img-responsive" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09503c1f970d-800wi" title="Miembros de la Contra" /></a>
<div class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09503c1f970d" id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09503c1f970d"><span style="color: #b9b9b9;">United States-supported anti-government &quot;Contra&quot; rebels in Southeast Nicaragua, 1987. CC BY-SA 3.0 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Smoke_break_el_serrano_1987.jpg">via Wikipedia</a>.</span></div>
</div>
<p>Nicaragua and the United States are approaching the 30-year anniversaries of two periods of national reckoning that took place in the waning years of the Contra War. The conflict erupted in 1981 just two years after the Sandinista National Liberation Front overthrew the Somoza regime, a brutal family dictatorship that had ruled Nicaragua for more than forty years. Once in office, Ronald Reagan, a devout anti-communist crusader, authorized the training and funding of counter-revolutionary forces or contras as part of a campaign to destabilize the Sandinista state. Armed resistance spread to the Atlantic coast region where dissatisfaction with the revolution grew in indigenous and Afrodescendant communities with the imposition of a new ruling order from Managua. By the end of the 1980s, the United States would extend over $400 million USD in <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1986/03/20/world/us-aid-to-the-contras-the-record-since-81.html">aid to the contras</a>, while the war and destabilization campaign would result in more than 30,000 deaths and billions of dollars in losses for Nicaragua.</p>
<p class="pull-quote">What has U.S. militarization meant for the people who live in militarized places around the world?</p>
<p>The Contra War continued until 1990 when the Nicaraguan people removed the Sandinistas from power by popular vote. But indigenous and Afrodescendant resistance began to subside in the mid-1980s as the Sandinista state sought to reconcile the revolutionary project with these communities by recognizing their rights to land and regional autonomy. In November 1986, the state enshrined these rights in law with the adoption of a new constitution followed by the passage of an autonomy statute for the Atlantic coast region in 1987. The reforms established the framework for some of the most expansive multicultural citizenship rights in Latin America. It still took more than two decades for the Nicaraguan state to title indigenous and Afrodescendant territories. And even with formal recognition, conditions remain precarious in these territories where deforestation, land dispossession, capitalist intensification, and drug war militarization threaten community life.</p>
<p>As Nicaragua negotiated an end to armed conflict with indigenous and Afrodescendant communities, a parallel process of national reckoning was unfolding in the United States: the Iran-Contra Affair. The <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1986/11/07/world/iran-is-said-to-get-us-weapons-aid-in-a-hostage-deal.html?pagewanted=all">scandal broke in the national media</a> in November 1986 after the Sandinista Army shot down a cargo plane carrying supplies for the contras. Nicaragua captured the only surviving crewmember, a former U.S. Marine, revealing <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1986/10/12/weekinreview/in-summary-nicaragua-downs-plane-and-survivor-implicates-cia.html">a covert program to arm the contras</a> that contravened U.S. legislation limiting aid to counter-revolutionary forces. Subsequent revelations linked funding for the program to illegal arms sales to Iran that were meant to help secure the freedom of U.S. hostages in Lebanon. Congressional hearings in 1987 led to a series of convictions (and later pardons) for Reagan administration officials implicated in the affair. Today the scandal remains a footnote in U.S. foreign policy, lost amid the rubble of forty to fifty more military interventions overseas since that time. As many as <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/the-united-states-probably-has-more-foreign-military-bases-than-any-other-people-nation-or-empire-in-history/">800 military bases in some eighty countries</a> now secure U.S. Empire, making this country the most militarized global power in history.</p>
<p>And what has militarization meant for the people who live in these places around the world? In Iraq alone, estimates suggest that <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2013/oct/15/world/la-fg-iraq-war-deaths-20131016">half a million men, women, and children died</a> after the U.S. invasion of the country in 2003. The death count was not as high and the destruction not as complete in Nicaragua, but indigenous and Afrodescendant communities still struggle with the legacy of the U.S.-funded Contra War in their region, where multicultural reforms have done little to stem postwar violence.</p>
<p class="large-quote">Indigenous and Afrodescendant communities still struggle with the legacy of the U.S.-funded Contra War in their region.</p>
<p><br />Since the early 2000s, I have conducted research with a rural Afrodescendant Kriol community on the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua called Monkey Point. Most people from Monkey Point who are over the age of forty preface their recollections of the past with before-the-war and after-the-war estimations of community welfare. An entire way of life—from agricultural economies and food sovereignty to family and community cohesion and physical security—was negatively affected by armed conflict. Nostalgia for the past shapes community memories, but the war clearly represents a violent rupture when “everything changed.”</p>
<p>When the conflict spread to their region, Monkey Point people joined the contras or fled north to the city of Bluefields or south to Costa Rican refugee camps. Several families lost sons to combat violence. Many never returned to the fishing and farming community that their ancestors established in the nineteenth century. These forebears left places like Grand Cayman Island and Martinique in search of an independent lifestyle free from the racial servitude that structured Caribbean economies and social life after emancipation. They had families and built a thriving community that stayed on the land until the 1980s. After the war, in the 1990s, Monkey Point people came home to rebuild the community. They formed alliances with their indigenous Rama neighbors and mobilized to secure territorial rights, which were now enshrined in Nicaraguan law. More than a decade of activism resulted in formal recognition of the Rama-Kriol Territory in 2009, but violence still exacts a harsh toll on community life.</p>
<div class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09503d0a970d photo-full " id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09503d0a970d" style="float: left; margin: 15px 25px 10px 0px; width: 200px;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=23822"><img alt="Black Autonomy" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09503d0a970d img-responsive" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09503d0a970d-800wi" title="Black Autonomy" /></a>
<div class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09503d0a970d" id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb09503d0a970d"><span style="color: #b9b9b9;"><a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=23822"><em>Black Autonomy</em> »</a> shows how Afro-Nicaraguan Creoles grapple with the day-to-day violence of capitalist intensification, racialized policing, and drug war militarization in their territories.</span></div>
</div>
<p>Postwar violence in Monkey Point is racially structured and systemic. In 1979, the Somoza regime left Nicaragua $1.6 billion USD in debt, which grew to <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1993/08/31/world/where-politics-and-poverty-intersect-in-nicaragua-signposts-are-missing.html?pagewanted=all">$10.8 billion USD by the end of the Contra War</a>. Neoliberal restructuring under Washington Consensus reforms in the 1990s did little to alleviate poverty or ease the country’s debt burden, which had grown so cumbersome by the mid-2000s that Nicaragua qualified for relief under the <a href="https://www.imf.org/external/np/exr/facts/hipc.htm">Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative</a>. The community struggled to revive the agrarian economy after the war, while young people left to work on Caribbean cruise ships or as nannies and hotel workers in Grand Cayman Island or Panama. Mestizo land colonists, many of them former contra combatants, settled the region in <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1990/05/31/world/contras-promise-to-give-up-arms-as-managua-vows-to-yield-land.html">land-for-arms exchanges with the Nicaraguan state</a>. Monkey Point people began to find sacks of cocaine floating in the sea and washed up on beaches in these years, as the region descended into drug war violence.</p>
<p>Today most community people associate the introduction of the drug trade with the Contra War. Former combatants from Monkey Point tell of contra smuggling networks and describe how economic crisis, militarization, and arms smuggling with Colombia during the war jumpstarted the trade. After the conflict subsided, they became racialized targets for counter-narcotics operations. The state established a military base in Monkey Point in 2004 to police the drug trade. Once ensconced in the community, mestizo soldiers sexually abused local girls and assaulted local men. Militarization now secures capitalist intensification in their territory, which comes in the form of a <a href="http://nacla.org/news/2016/05/20/nicaragua-latest-zombie-megaproject">Chinese-led Interoceanic Grand Canal</a>. If built, the canal will displace the people of Monkey Point and their Rama neighbors to the south.</p>
<p>Complex national and global forces conditioned the path from the Contra War in the 1980s to postwar violence today. But in the narratives of Monkey Point people, the experiential links are clear. Territorial recognition gives community people more political leverage than they have ever had, but multicultural reforms do not un-break a society ravaged by war. What community activists, and indeed history, call for now is a radical reimagining of political and social life alongside new egalitarian and democratic investments in the most marginalized sectors of global society. For the United States, the demilitarization of foreign policy is an essential place to start.</p>
<p class="start-reading"><a href="http://www.sup.org/books/extra/?id=23822&amp;i=Excerpt%20from%20the%20Introduction.html">Start reading <em>Black Autonomy</em> »</a></p>
<p class="start-reading">&#0160;</p>
<p class="author-bio">Jennifer Goett is Associate Professor of Comparative Cultures and Politics at Michigan State University and author of <em><a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=23822">Black Autonomy: Race, Gender, and Afro-Nicaraguan Activism</a></em>.</p>AnthropologyLatin American StudiesStanford University Press2016-11-10T08:30:00-08:00Harnessing Entrepreneurshiphttp://stanfordpress.typepad.com/blog/2016/11/harnessing-entrepreneurship.html
Rwanda teaches students that orderly innovation is the path to national progress.<p class="blog-tagline">Rwanda teaches students that orderly innovation is the path to national progress.</p>
<p class="author-byline">by CATHERINE A. HONEYMAN</p>
<div class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d23545b7970c photo-full " id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d23545b7970c" style="display: inline-block;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d23545b7970c-pi"><img alt="Microfinance center" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d23545b7970c image-full img-responsive" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d23545b7970c-800wi" title="Microfinance center" /></a>
<div class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d23545b7970c" id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d23545b7970c"><span style="color: #b9b9b9;">A customer at a microfinance center in Rwanda. Photo from Trócaire. CC BY 2.0 <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/trocaire/14058146022/in/photolist-nqgF2Y-sw5pvM-nVWyVX-nDKfaf-nDJTgT-nDJWqP-az8kSr-9wwSK5-nY1ZCe-nDKaiJ-nW9bmC-nVWyzX-nVWuKH-6EZAox-nVWvj8-aCXkWy-ehdL6t-6EZAe2-nDJUFX-dwmG22-nWewyT-6EZAbp-rz4K7w-nDLc5z-nVWkJM-nDKY1t-nY261t-dwsdTw-nDK9J5-nDK95j-nVWztR-nW7yr1-dwmGgX-nY1RWn-nWeLMc-nW7NXf-qFMqok-nVWqjP-nDKd8F-nUcjkS-6EZAhv-6F4K57-6F4K83-nY1Xvt-nDKkh1-nDKeEs-nY1Rit-nW95bb-nDKkDo-nWeEFe">via Flickr</a>.</span></div>
</div>
<p>Pineapples with juice dripping down their sides, neatly tied bags of passion fruit and tree tomatoes, shiny green imported apples, golden-skinned finger bananas—at one time, the intersection close to my Kigali home was crowded with women carrying their merchandise, in wide baskets atop their heads and in woven bags slung over each arm. Near them, you could always find a young man or two selling sweets and biscuits from a cardboard box. Needed to clean the dust off your shoes before venturing into town? Someone was always carrying around packages of tissues for 100 francs each.</p>
<p class="pull-quote">Rwanda is the site of one of the most extensive efforts to promote youth entrepreneurship in the world.</p>
<p>Once a characteristic image of street life just about anywhere on the African continent, this sort of scene has almost disappeared in Rwanda. Street businesses have been tidied up and brought into the formal market, and they are required to have a fixed and formal place of business. Prepared foods must be properly labeled and inspected for consumer safety; motorcycle taxi drivers must belong to a cooperative, wear numbered uniforms, and provide helmets; all businesses must register, obtain a license, and become part of the tax system.</p>
<p>These are all sensible regulations, arguably modeled on the way things work in many developed economies. And in Rwanda, they are enforced with increasing effectiveness each year. This is Rwanda’s contemporary aesthetic of entrepreneurship, of national progress: clean streets, orderly businesses, everything registered and known—an orderly and regulated form of self-reliance from the broadest policies down to the tiniest details.</p>
<p>In Rwanda, in other words, the streetside “lemonade stand” wouldn’t be considered an iconic and positive image of the youthful entrepreneur—it would be disorderly conduct, plain and simple.</p>
<p>And yet the Rwandan government is in favor of youth entrepreneurship. Highly in favor, in fact. Rwanda is the site of one of the most extensive efforts to promote youth entrepreneurship in the world—since 2009, all secondary school students have been required to take a six-year course in entrepreneurship. And just like their other subjects, this course is examinable on the high-stakes national examinations that are popularly seen as determining access to university—and therefore to “good” jobs.</p>
<p>Entrepreneurship education in Rwanda, however, can sometimes seem like a contradiction in terms. Efforts toward self-reliance meet regulations that present significant barriers to small business start-ups. At the same time, rote learning in schools with an emphasis on examinations often seems incompatible with independent problem solving. Cultivating entrepreneurial creativity may, in other words, conflict in real ways with the simultaneous emphasis on introducing controls to regulate an orderly process of development, and with the widespread perception that school is more about acquiring credentials than capabilities.</p>
<p class="large-quote">Entrepreneurship education in Rwanda, however, can sometimes seem like a contradiction in terms. Efforts toward self-reliance meet regulations that present significant barriers to small business start-ups.</p>
<p><br />Yet this delicate, tension-filled balance of creativity, credentials, and controls is in fact just what the Rwandan government hopes to achieve as it works to harness the population’s entrepreneurial initiative in service of national development. And Rwanda is not alone. A number of former developmental states with strong traditions of state regulation and strategic economic planning—such as China, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan—are pursuing goals essentially along the same lines. Like Rwanda, these states are all involved in attempts to transform their educational systems in order to promote qualities like creativity, independent problem solving, and entrepreneurial initiative while still retaining a strong state role in a regulated process of economic growth.</p>
<div class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d235449d970c photo-full " id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d235449d970c" style="float: left; margin: 15px 25px 10px 0px; width: 199px;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://sup.org/books/title/?id=24787"><img alt="The Orderly Entrepreneur" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d235449d970c img-responsive" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d235449d970c-800wi" title="The Orderly Entrepreneur" /></a>
<div class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d235449d970c" id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d235449d970c"><span style="color: #b9b9b9;"><a href="http://sup.org/books/title/?id=24787"><em>The Orderly Entrepreneur</em> »</a> investigates the impact and reception of the Rwanda’s entrepreneurship curriculum.</span></div>
</div>
<p>Since Rwanda has explicitly adopted Singapore as a role model, this similarity is no coincidence. In an age when these very states figure so prominently in the global picture of economic growth, we would do well to look more deeply into the economic and social ideals that shape them. Rwanda’s experience with entrepreneurship education, I argue in my recent book, provides insight into a “post-developmental” approach to governance that is rising on the world stage, promoting an ethos of regulated self-reliance and envisioning the ideal citizen as a sort of orderly entrepreneur.</p>
<p>Drawing on several years of ethnographic research involving nearly 500 participants and spanning each stage of the policy process, I have worked to bring together a set of ideas that will make it possible to discuss what is happening in such disparate parts of the world, countries that—while they will likely never share a single form of government—nonetheless may be developing a recognizably similar style of governance. I also seek to make available my observations of the underlying processes at work in the cultivation of the orderly entrepreneur in one particular context—among Rwanda’s youth studying in or near the country’s capital, Kigali.</p>
<p>For young people, not surprisingly, have their own perspectives on the policies that are intended to shape them into orderly entrepreneurs—and it is their interpretations and reinterpretations that will help determine the eventual significance of post-developmental government strategies, in Rwanda and beyond.</p>
<p class="following-excerpt">This post has been adapted from <em><a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=24787">The Orderly Entrepreneur</a> </em>by Catherine A. Honeyman.</p>
<p class="start-reading"><a href="http://sup.org/books/extra/?id=24787&amp;i=Excerpt%20from%20Chapter%201.html">Start reading <em>The Orderly Entrepreneur</em> »</a></p>
<p class="author-bio">&#0160;</p>
<p class="author-bio">Catherine A. Honeyman (<a href="https://twitter.com/CAHoneyman">@CAHoneyman</a>) is Visiting Scholar at the Duke Center for International Development, Managing Director of Ishya Consulting, and author of <em><a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=24787">The Orderly Entrepreneur: Youth, Education, and Governance in Rwanda</a></em>.</p>AnthropologyStanford University Press2016-11-09T08:30:00-08:00Diversity: America vs. Francehttp://stanfordpress.typepad.com/blog/2016/11/diversity-america-vs-france.html
Two authors discuss how notions of race, culture, and gender differ when we toggle between American Exceptionalism and the French Exception.<p class="blog-tagline">Two authors discuss how notions of race, culture, and gender differ when we toggle between American Exceptionalism and the French Exception.</p>
<p class="author-byline">a Q&amp;A with LAURE MURAT and BRUNO PERREAU</p>
<div class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d232de33970c photo-full " id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d232de33970c" style="display: inline-block;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d232de33970c-pi"><img alt="America vs. France" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d232de33970c image-full img-responsive" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d232de33970c-800wi" title="America vs. France" /></a>
<div class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d232de33970c" id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d232de33970c">&#0160;</div>
</div>
<p>While both France and the U.S. boast a racially and culturally diverse population whose sexual orientations and identities run a broad gamut, each country conceives of this diversity and of notions of citizenship in unique ways. Laure Murat and Bruno Perreau, two scholars who have made the transatlantic journey form French academia to the ivory towers of the U.S., offer their insights on these in the dialogue below.</p>
<p>&#0160;</p>
<p class="question-q">Q:</p>
<p>How has migrating from France to the US transformed your scholarly work on France?</p>
<p>&#0160;</p>
<p class="question-a">A:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 90px;"><span style="color: #800000;"><strong>LAURE MURAT:</strong></span>&#0160;It’s transformed it in many ways. First, I should specify that I migrated from Paris to Los Angeles, and not from some provincial town in France to New York City or to the Midwest, for instance, which would have been different in each case. The greater distance (in miles, time difference and culture) from California makes a real difference, as well as the fact that Los Angeles is a very big and fascinating city but also the opposite extreme of Paris. It allows me reassess my vision of France and consider more accurately its limitations, its alienation from the past, but also its great qualities.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 90px;">Second, I had the luck to be hired at UCLA, a great institution where intellectual life is extremely vibrant. Every week, lectures, conferences, and screenings give us the opportunity to discover new ways of thinking and work from people all over the world. My experience is of a “decolonization” of the mind and of a new openness. In particular, everything related to diversity, gender and queer theory, black feminism, racism, and the like is at the core of a complex reflection that France largely ignores. I also deeply appreciate the liberty we experience in the US when it comes to moving boundaries between disciplines.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 90px;"><span style="color: #800000;"><strong>BRUNO PERREAU:</strong></span>&#0160;Absolutely. Living in the US and working at UCLA and MIT has allowed us to cross and transform disciplinary borders in ways that would be deemed irrelevant at most institutions in France. It’s not so much that research questions are fundamentally different there, but there’s more possibility in the US to navigate between different methods, to experiment, and discuss. What comes out of this is greater critical depth.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 90px;">Now, my experience of migrating to the US is quite different from Laure’s. I was born in a small city in Burgundy. I’d already immigrated once—to Paris as a student. I had to learn a new language and get accustomed to social rites of passage I was not even aware of. Conversely, migrating to the US reinforced my ties to my roots, which were very much steeped in American popular culture—TV series, and films in particular. Since I live on the East Coast, distance is less geographic than epistemic: when I first moved here, I entered a cultural loop where transatlantic cultural fantasies and practices confront one another. Now these echoes are even more distorted in my case, because I also studied in England, and was a fellow for a few years at the University of Cambridge. My reassessment of France also emerged in the context of another form of decolonization, between England and New England!</p>
<p style="padding-left: 90px;">&#0160;</p>
<p class="question-q">Q:</p>
<p>Do you find that notions of&#0160;“diversity&quot; are framed in different&#0160;ways in the French and American contexts?</p>
<p>&#0160;</p>
<p class="question-a">A:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 90px;"><span style="color: #800000;"><strong>LAURE MURAT:</strong></span> I would say that “diversity” is framed the opposite way in each country. The legacy of secularism in France, promoting the idea of a “neutral” and “universal” citizen regardless of his or her race, religion, sexual orientation, and so on, leads to a politics that is the reverse of American multiculturalism. Two recent examples illustrate the French refusal to consider differences in identities:&#0160;the ban of the word “race” in the Constitution and last summer’s tentative interdiction of the burkini, the swimsuit designed for Muslim women. On the one hand, you have a utopia that would like to erase all kinds of differences and posit a neutral Republic, on the other, a society that pays lots of attention to identity differences, focusing on the rights of minorities and promoting inclusiveness. I feel closer to the American way of thinking, which is more attuned to the way people live in today’s global world. But I have to note that neither of these two societies has succeeded in eradicating racisms.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 90px;"><strong><span style="color: #800000;">BRUNO PERREAU:</span>&#0160;</strong>You zero in on a very important problem when you use racisms in the plural. France famously welcomed Josephine Baker, and Miles Davis, even while stigmatizing its own residents and black citizens from its colonial empire. Diversity claims are not sufficient. Institutions must fight each and every specific form of racist behavior, speech, and hate-crime with unique and mobile strategies. France is very much running behind in that regard. For example, diversity is associated with the idea of safety on American campuses. Not that all campuses are totally safe, far from it. But the ideal pursued by academic institutions is to give everybody a safe space to grow personally, and thus intellectually. Somehow, in France, creativity is meant to result from insecurity, even precariousness. The more obstacles you face, the more you learn. This is largely hypocritical, because not everyone faces the same obstacles. For minorities, it’s a catch-22. They are asked to abandon who they are and what they think and to prove they can act, talk, and function like the majority. But they are permanently called out in the name of their identities and practices. This is why affirmative action matters, in France, and in the US. Too much talent has already been lost!</p>
<p style="padding-left: 120px;">&#0160;</p>
<p class="question-q">Q:</p>
<p>What has recently caught your attention when it comes to the articulation of race, gender, sex, and sexuality?</p>
<p>&#0160;</p>
<p class="question-a">A:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 90px;"><span style="color: #800000;"><strong>LAURE MURAT:</strong></span>&#0160;A few years ago, I wrote a preface to the French edition of <em>Passing</em> by Nella Larsen, a beautiful novel of the Harlem Renaissance movement about a “legally Black” woman passing as white. I was struck last year when I discovered the case of Rachel Dolezal, a white anti-racist woman who passed as Black for a decade and who was finally “outed.” Dolezal has two Black kids who see their mother as “racially white and culturally black.” The whole story addresses the fascinating question about self-determination. Am I just as entitled to choose my race as my gender?</p>
<p style="padding-left: 90px;">A month ago, I also discovered <em>The Argonauts</em>, by Maggie Nelson, a groundbreaking work integrating theory into autobiographical narrative, a technique the author calls “autotheory.” I’ve never read such a beautifully crafted account about what a queer family is and what questions are at stake when it comes to gender (non) binarism in today’s society. I should add that it is mostly a book about love, a crucial word we too often forget.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 90px;"><span style="color: #800000;"><strong>BRUNO PERREAU:</strong>&#0160;</span>A few weeks ago, Pope Francis explained that using the notion of “gender” in schools amounts to “ideological colonization.” In <a href="http://sup.org/books/title/?id=27481"><em>Queer Theory: The French Response</em></a>, I show how in France, this fear has taken on the spectral form of an American invasion. One aspect of this that interests me is how race becomes a vehicle for expressing this fear. Christiane Taubira, Minister of Justice at the time and herself originally from French Guyana, defended the bill on gay marriage before the parliament by quoting celebrated poets of Negritude, such as Léon-Gontran Damas and Aimé Césaire. She became not only the spokesperson, but also the embodiment of a singular minority presence. For a brief moment, it seemed unnecessary to don the clothes of the majority in order to participate in a public debate: gay and lesbian voices could resonate through the voice of the Minister of Justice.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 90px;">Taubira was also the author of a 2001 law that recognized slavery as a crime against humanity. The law’s adoption caused a big stir, mobilized by cries that France should not have to repent, that clinging to the past only fed the flames of racism. Christiane Taubira was thus accused of weakening France, of sacrificing it on the altar of communitarian interests, which the French associate with multicultural societies like the US. This example shows that intersectionality doesn’t suffice as a way of understanding the articulation of race, gender, sex, sexuality, and class. Taubira accomplished a form of “crossing” of identities, a “passing” if you will, a notion whose fluidity lies at the very heart of what “queer” means.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 90px;">&#0160;</p>
<p class="author-bio">Laure Murat, Professor of French Studies, and Director of the Center for European and Russian Studies at UCLA , is the author of several books including <a href="http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo15344276.html"><em>The Man Who Thought He Was Napoleon: Towards a Political History of Madness</em></a> and, most recently, <a href="http://editions.flammarion.com/Albums_Detail.cfm?ID=50008&amp;levelCode=home"><em>Ceci n’est pas une ville</em></a>, a book that reflects on the differences between Los Angeles and Paris.</p>
<p class="author-bio">Bruno Perreau, Cynthia L. Reed Professor, and Associate Professor of French Studies at MIT, is the author of several books including <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/index.php?q=books/politics-adoption"><em>The Politics of Adoption: Gender and the Making of French Citizenship</em></a> and, most recently, <a href="http://sup.org/books/title/?id=27481"><em>Queer Theory: The French Response</em></a>.</p>Culture & Media StudiesSociologyStanford University Press2016-11-08T08:30:00-08:00Against Abstractionhttp://stanfordpress.typepad.com/blog/2016/11/against-abstraction.html
The most alarming aspect of the American political climate today is a failure of empathy.<p class="blog-tagline">The most alarming aspect of the American political climate today is a failure of empathy.</p>
<p class="author-byline">by KAREN INOUYE</p>
<div class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb094ef050970d photo-full " id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb094ef050970d" style="display: inline-block;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01bb094ef050970d-pi"><img alt="Khizr and Ghazala Khan" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb094ef050970d image-full img-responsive" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01bb094ef050970d-800wi" title="Khizr and Ghazala Khan" /></a>
<div class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb094ef050970d" id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb094ef050970d"><span style="color: #b9b9b9;">Khizr and Ghazala Khan at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. Public domain <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Khizr_and_Ghazala_Khan_at_the_2016_DNC_(cropped).jpg">via Wikipedia</a>.</span></div>
</div>
<p>Of the many alarming aspects of the current American political climate, perhaps the most striking is the frequency with which politicians, political commentators, and the electorate have taken recourse to emotional abstraction. This may seem an odd assertion, given the more obvious invigoration of the alt-right, the continuing financial pollution of representative government, and the ferociousness of debates about race, faith, and belonging in American society.</p>
<p>Much has been said about the perversion of history that allows some to suggest that this country should implement blanket exclusions, large-scale deportation, or even mass imprisonment based on geographical origin or religious affiliation. As many people have noted, such views warp the shameful history of this country’s behavior toward marginal groups. Among other things, those views obliviate or even deny outright the Constitutional, economic, and political damage done by Executive Order 9066, which saw over 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry forced from the West Coast and relocated to what Franklin Delano Roosevelt himself called concentration camps.</p>
<p class="large-quote">Much has been said about the perversion of history that allows some to suggest that this country should implement blanket exclusions based on geographical origin or religious affiliation.</p>
<p><br />Criticisms of this sort are entirely valid, but they raise another question: What allows such sentiment to reach critical mass? This is an easy question to miss, particularly when the election cycle asks us to identify our political hopes, fears, dreams, and resentments with one or another person, rather than with the people and policies associated with that person. The risk in this is that we will ignore the engine of that person’s candidacy. And to ignore that engine is to ignore a vital, if elusive, part of what allows reactionary sentiment to gain purchase in the first place: emotional abstraction, which is in truth a failure of empathy.</p>
<p>Political campaigns necessarily trade in certitude, their claims streamlined and tailored for the broadest impact and the quickest payoff. To that end, they appeal to patterns already in place, and as those patterns repeat themselves they tend to come unmoored from reality as they undergo further streamlining, focus-grouping, and tailoring for efficiency. Election-cycle claims thus become like a dysfunctional family more interested in scoring rhetorical points than making a genuine connection. The result is a tailspin of continuing abstraction, as ideas increasingly come to resemble parodies of themselves (ever bolder, ever more confident, but ever less anchored to facts on the ground), shading out nuance and polarizing audiences.</p>
<p class="pull-quote">The example of the Khans holds an important lesson for us.</p>
<p>There was perhaps only one moment in the 2016 presidential election when that tailspin may genuinely have come to a halt, albeit briefly, and that was when Khizr and Ghazala Khan publicly honored their son, Humayun, who died in a suicide bombing during the Iraq War. Despite being part of the Democratic National Convention, and despite being directed specifically at the Republican nominee, Khizr Khan’s remarks were profoundly important, for they provided a point of contact for people who might otherwise never have had reason to talk to—perhaps even think of—one another. From military veterans and their families to Muslim activists, the Khan family became a site of shared identification, even as vast differences among people remained visible.</p>
<p>It is tempting to think of Khizr Khan’s remarks as little more than a public relations coup aided by intemperate responses on the right, but to do so is to miss the most important aspect of those remarks: their extraordinary emotional weight. The profound loss the Khans continue to suffer in the wake of their son’s death is what drew people to the family, exerting a kind of gravitational force that has acted across political, religious, and racial spectra. Tellingly, that gravitational force has continued to exert itself long after the convention and well beyond the confines of one party or another.</p>
<p>That gravitational force isn’t uniform; it acts on different individuals in different ways. When Khan asked if his son would have a place in a right-wing world order, his question resonated with military veterans in one way, with Muslim Americans in another, with recent immigrants in still another, and so forth. In this respect, his question is a close relative of the cultural work (not merely political) that many Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians have been performing in the wake of their wartime experiences of injustice. From Congressional testimony in support of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 to participating in retroactive diploma ceremonies all along the West Coast, from Seattle and Los Angeles to Vancouver, B.C., these people have sought to demonstrate much more than the fact that the past is repeatable, and that such repetitions are avoidable. They also have sought to demonstrate to others that action derives first and foremost from direct, emotional investment.</p>
<p class="large-quote">&quot;There are Arab Americans today who are going through what Japanese Americans experienced years ago.&quot;</p>
<p><br />A case in point is when, in December of 2015, Donald Trump flirted with the wartime incarceration of Japanese and Japanese Americans as potential precedent for how he would respond to threats of Islamic terrorism within the U.S. Though Trump ultimately walked his statements back, he did so at least partly in the face of vehement criticism from a spectrum of sources. Most important among these were people of Japanese ancestry themselves, who spoke not only to the Constitutional threats of mass incarceration, but also to the toll that imprisonment took. The Japanese American National Museum, for instance, warned in a formal statement that “History reminds us that as a nation we must not target any one group—be it racial, ethnic, religious, or based on any other single criteria—and deprive those in the group of freedom and human rights. We strongly caution against rhetoric that purposely provokes unfounded fear of any one group….”</p>
<div class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d235b3f9970c photo-full " id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d235b3f9970c" style="float: left; margin: 15px 25px 10px 0px; width: 199px;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://sup.org/books/title/?id=25051"><img alt="The Long Afterlife of Nikkei Wartime Incarceration" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d235b3f9970c img-responsive" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d235b3f9970c-800wi" title="The Long Afterlife of Nikkei Wartime Incarceration" /></a>
<div class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d235b3f9970c" id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d235b3f9970c"><span style="color: #b9b9b9;"><a href="http://sup.org/books/title/?id=25051"><em>The Long Afterlife of Nikkei Wartime Incarceration</em> » </a>reexamines the imprisonment of Japanese Americans&#0160;during WWII and details the dangers of suspending rights during times of crisis.</span></div>
</div>
<p>Though directed most obviously toward ethical questions, the Museum’s statement also struck an emotional chord, adding that, “we know from experience that such rhetoric can lead to hysteria that only impedes meaningful leadership of our democracy.” In this respect, they echoed a sentiment that Fred Korematsu, one of a handful of Japanese Americans who challenged the legality of Executive Order 9066, voiced in an interview late in life. Asked about contemporary parallels, Korematsu observed that “There are Arab Americans today who are going through what Japanese Americans experienced years ago, and we can’t let that happen again. I met someone years ago who had never heard of the roundup of Japanese Americans. It’s been sixty years since this [arrest] happened, and it’s happening again, and that’s why I continue to talk about what happened to me.”</p>
<p>With respect to the 2016 election cycle, the example of the Khans holds an important lesson for us. Injustice, whether bruited casually or pursued programmatically, exacts a toll that cannot be measured solely in lost income or missed professional opportunities. That toll is also personal, and its corrosive effects work at an individual level. But they work not only on the targets of unjust behavior and vicious sentiment; they also work on those who trade in such behavior, those who voice such sentiment. The people who peddle stereotypes seek to perpetuate convenient abstractions drained of all emotion, save fear, which drives us away from one another and into increasing isolation. Empathy, by contrast, draws us together. It is the gravitational force that can enable us to recuperate the past on an individual level and, in so doing, move beyond dry templates for thought and toward genuinely productive action. Abstraction is the enemy of the good, and only through the hard cultural and political work of pursuing its opposite, empathy, can we hope to hold that enemy at bay.</p>
<p>&#0160;</p>
<p class="start-reading"><a href="http://sup.org/books/extra/?id=25051&amp;i=Introduction.html">Start reading <em>The Long Afterlife of <br /></em></a><a href="http://sup.org/books/extra/?id=25051&amp;i=Introduction.html"><em>Nikkei Wartime Incarceration</em> »</a></p>
<p class="author-bio">Karen M. Inouye is Assistant Professor of American Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington and author of <em><a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=25051">The Long Afterlife of Nikkei Wartime Incarceration</a></em>.</p>HistoryStanford University Press2016-11-07T08:35:24-08:00100 Years of Dadahttp://stanfordpress.typepad.com/blog/2016/11/100-years-of-dada.html
Does commemorating Dadaism contradict the spirit of Dada?<p class="blog-tagline">Does commemorating Dadaism contradict the spirit of Dada?</p>
<p class="author-byline">by MARIA STAVRINAKI</p>
<div id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c8abfd94970b" class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c8abfd94970b photo-full " style="display: inline-block;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c8abfd94970b-pi"><img class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c8abfd94970b image-full img-responsive" title="Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c8abfd94970b-800wi" alt="Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife" border="0" /></a>
<div id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c8abfd94970b" class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c8abfd94970b"><span style="color: #b9b9b9;">"Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany." Hannah Höch, 1919. Publc domain <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_H%C3%B6ch#/media/File:Hoch-Cut_With_the_Kitchen_Knife.jpg">via Wikipedia</a>.</span></div>
</div>
<p class="following-excerpt">To mark the 100th anniversary of the emergence of Dada, City Lights Booksellers in conjunction with other local and international partners, celebrates Dadaism this week and next at the <a href="http://www.dadaworldfair.net/#hans-arp">Dada World Fair in San Francisco</a>, bringing together artists, thinkers, and ideas the world-over. In what follows, <a href="http://www.dadaworldfair.net/the-books/">author Maria Stavrianki</a> offers her thoughts on the occasion.</p>
<p class="ellipsis">...</p>
<p>Is it legitimate to celebrate the centenary of Dada? Doesn’t the commemoration of a founding fundamentally contradict the spirit and the practices of the movement, which, despite its intrinsic heterogeneity, was characterized in all its variants by its struggle against the reification of time and history? Rather than a movement, moreover, Dada was a constellation, shaped in different places and at different moments by fundamentally different individuals.</p>
<p>This is what so radically distinguished Dada from other avant-garde movements, which took on organicist or more rigorously organized and in any case more hierarchical forms. It was the name “Dada” that ultimately gave phonetic unity to a historical manifestation that was difficult to contain as a stable form. “Da,” a phoneme of infinite and infantile plasticity, brought calcified language back to its first indeterminate articulations.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<div id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb094ef856970d" class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb094ef856970d photo-full " style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; width: 336px;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01bb094ef856970d-pi"><img class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb094ef856970d img-responsive" title="Die Kunst ist tot" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01bb094ef856970d-800wi" alt="Die Kunst ist tot" border="0" /></a>
<div id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb094ef856970d" class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb094ef856970d"><span style="color: #b9b9b9;">Artists George Grosz and John Heartfield hold a sign reading "Art is dead" at the Dada fair in Berlin, 1920. Public domain <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Die_Kunst_ist_tot.Tatlin.jpg">via Wikimedia</a>.</span></div>
</div>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>Dada was a “child” whose birth was celebrated at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916 by a performance that imitated and parodied the birth of Christ. The imitation did not aim to take over the redemptive vocation of Christian religion (redemption of any sort, including that of art, being rejected for its overly fragile postulates and its always catastrophic effects), but was instead a nod to the non-causal birth of the Messiah.</p>
<div id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c8ac3a2d970b" class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c8ac3a2d970b photo-full " style="float: left; margin: 15px 25px 10px 0px; width: 196px;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://sup.org/books/title/?id=24435"><img class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c8ac3a2d970b img-responsive" style="border: 1px solid #888888;" title="Dada Presentism" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c8ac3a2d970b-800wi" alt="Dada Presentism" border="0" /></a>
<div id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c8ac3a2d970b" class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c8ac3a2d970b"><span style="color: #b9b9b9;"><a href="http://sup.org/books/title/?id=24435"><em>Dada Presentism</em> »</a> provides a new picture of Dadaism as a lucid reflection on history and the role of art within it.</span></div>
</div>
<p>What was Dada’s ancestry? Who among the artists participating in the events of Cabaret Voltaire gave it its name? The a-causality of Dada was a feature of its exceptional and, in a word, its double nature: eternal and ephemeral, it was like the present, which passes by without ever dying away. It’s interesting, in this regard, to think of Dada’s posterity—all those artists of the 1950s and the 1960s who found in the Dadaist principles of chance, contingency, and the world’s horizontal relationships an alternative model to the virile vertical postures of art.</p>
<p>Today, Dada plays a “good” role in the writing of art history: its mistrust of utopias speaks to our own disenchantment; its awareness of the contingency of history is also terribly familiar to us and we prefer its tragic buffoonery to the certainties of the charismatic masters of so many other avant-gardes. The celebration of Dada’s centenary is thus, in a way, our own: it lets us take possession of history with the hope that Dada’s—its farcical heroism—will reverberate in our present.</p>
<p>Is it legitimate to celebrate the centenary of Dada? As much as it is any other moment of history, with the acute awareness that today, Dada is a symptom of our own historicity. After all, the appropriation of the past by the present is a way to protect it against reification.</p>
<p class="start-reading"><a href="http://sup.org/books/extra/?id=24435&amp;i=Excerpt%20from%20Chapter%201.html">Start reading <em>Dada Presentism</em> »</a></p>
<p class="start-reading">&nbsp;</p>
<p class="author-bio">Maria Stavrinaki is Associate Professor of Art History and Theory at the Pantheon-Sorbonne University and author of <a href="http://sup.org/books/title/?id=24435"><em>Dada Presentism: An Essay on Art and History</em></a><em>.</em></p>HistoryStanford University Press2016-11-04T08:30:00-07:00Debating Moderate Islamhttp://stanfordpress.typepad.com/blog/2016/11/debating-moderate-islam.html
On the post-9/11 Muslim American experience and the “Ground Zero Mosque” controversy.<p class="blog-tagline">On the post-9/11 Muslim American experience and the “Ground Zero Mosque” controversy.</p>
<p class="author-byline">by ROSEMARY R. CORBETT</p>
<div class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c8a9066a970b photo-full " id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c8a9066a970b" style="display: inline-block;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c8a9066a970b-pi"><img alt="Prayer" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c8a9066a970b image-full img-responsive" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c8a9066a970b-800wi" title="Prayer" /></a>
<div class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c8a9066a970b" id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c8a9066a970b"><span style="color: #b9b9b9;">Military and civilian personnel attend a Muslim prayer service at the Washington Navy Yard Chapel, Washington, D.C., 2010. Public domain.</span></div>
</div>
<p>&#0160;</p>
<p>In December 2009, Feisal Abdul Rauf, a prominent imam, Sufi shaykh, and the internationally recognized leader of the Cordoba Initiative, announced plans to open Cordoba House, a thirteen-story Islamic community center in Manhattan. The proposed center was to be built on a location two blocks from the World Trade Center site. Though designed to educate Americans about the truths Islam shares with other faiths and to exemplify “moderate Islam”—something Rauf had spent nearly a decade promoting—the proposed center was quickly embroiled in debate that eventually became known as the “Ground Zero Mosque” controversy.</p>
<p>After 9/11 both local leaders and international elites had widely praised Rauf’s core message, delivered at his mosque, in his public appearances, and in his 2004 book, <a href="https://www.harpercollins.com/9780060750626/whats-right-with-islam"><em>What’s Right with Islam</em></a><em>. </em>That message emphasizes Islam’s place within an ethical tradition originating with Abraham (the biblical patriarch common to Judaism and Christianity). Further, it holds that of all the governments in the world, American liberal democracy best embodies this ethic in social form. Because US multiculturalism, pluralism, and “democratic capitalism” are expressions of the “Abrahamic” ethic, Rauf argues, US laws and institutions comply with Islamic law (shari‘ah). Consequently, non-Muslim American can accept Muslims as Abrahamic siblings, while Muslim Americans can promote American liberal values and social systems worldwide.</p>
<p class="large-quote">Because US multiculturalism, pluralism, and “democratic capitalism” are expressions of the “Abrahamic” ethic, Rauf argues, US laws and institutions comply with Islamic law (shari‘ah).</p>
<p><br />Given the generally positive reception his message of Abrahamic commonality had enjoyed, the imam did not expect significant opposition to his Cordoba House initiative. Indeed, many religious, political, and financial leaders responded positively to the project, and a Manhattan community board gave its approval. Others, however—especially politicians practiced in using fear of Islam for electoral gain—denounced the center, turning it and Rauf’s claims of moderation into subjects of international debate.</p>
<p>While Rauf describes American society as “Abrahamic,” his opponents and critics insist it is “Judeo-Christian” in culture and origin and had argued well before the Ground Zero Mosque debate that Muslims pose a threat to the nation’s Judeo-Christian character. For example, when the first Muslim elected to Congress—black American Keith Ellison from Minnesota—performed his oath of office with Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an instead of a Bible in 2006, Republican Congressman <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/21/us/21koran.html?_r=0">Virgil Goode wrote a cautionary letter</a> to hundreds of voters warning that “we are leaving ourselves vulnerable to infiltration by those who want to mold the United States into the image of their religion rather than working within the Judeo-Christian principles that have made us a beacon of freedom-loving peoples around the world.”</p>
<p class="pull-quote">For evidence of the Abrahamic-American ethical convergence, Rauf points to the liberal philosophies of religion, reason, and rights.</p>
<p>Despite the differences between Rauf and his most prominent critics, both he and they define the nation’s identity in terms of an exceptional “American Creed” based on US founding documents, fortified by religious roots and replete with economic implications. For evidence of the Abrahamic-American ethical convergence, Rauf points to the liberal philosophies of religion, reason, and rights expressed most clearly in the Declaration of Independence. Because the Declaration “ground[ed] itself in reason, just as the Quran and the Abrahamic ethic did in asserting the self-evident oneness of God,” he declares, it embodies the same moral and philosophical worldview revealed to the Prophet Muhammad. In other words, shari‘ah is not just complementary to American values, for Rauf, it is based in the same mixture of reason and revelation. Consequently, although no political society on earth will ever embody Islamic precepts as fully as the Prophet Muhammad’s did, the United States comes as close as possible and constitutes a “shariah-compliant” state.</p>
<p>Although Rauf promoted a vision of moderate Islam that echoes standard narratives of American exceptionalism, his Cordoba House project faced vociferous resistance and the controversy intensified in the summer of 2010, during which Republican Congressman Peter King claimed Rauf only posed as a moderate and should be investigated for ties to radical Islam. King was not the first public official to castigate the imam this way; Newt Gingrich, then an aspiring presidential candidate, argued that the medieval city of Cordoba for which the project was named signified not interreligious coexistence, as Rauf argued, but Islamic conquest over a Christian kingdom. This was something, Gingrich claimed, that Muslims sought to repeat in the United States. Such accusations prompted Sharif El-Gamal, the project’s developer and one of Rauf’s Sufi dervishes, to rename the proposed community center after its street address: “Park51.” Still, Gingrich <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xd2Wrea1LPI">likened building Cordoba House to placing Nazi signs near Holocaust memorials</a> or to erecting a Japanese cultural center near Pearl Harbor.</p>
<p>Several commentators, including <a href="http://www.cc.com/video-clips/r00hey/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-mosque-erade">former <em>Daily Show</em> host Jon Stewart, responded</a> to such hyperbole by comparing the situation of contemporary Muslim Americans to that of Catholic and Jewish Americans during the early twentieth century. Similarly, reiterating one of his constant themes of the preceding decade, Rauf described overcoming nativist discrimination in the United States as part of the general “immigrant religious experience”—a sociological process Catholics and Jews had completed, providing Muslims with a template for how to successfully Americanize while retaining core tenets of faith. Rauf had long joined this story of assimilation, upward mobility, and moderation to another exceptionalist narrative—one created by earlier immigrants who emphasized that they could contribute to the nation’s exemplary progress because they supported the same ethics (including work ethics) as dominant white Protestants, as well as the moral obligation to engage in community service so as to shore up America’s free-market system. Community service and voluntarism, in this scenario, were often proffered as alternatives to the government aid that was increasingly associated with non-white populations.</p>
<p class="large-quote">Rauf described overcoming nativist discrimination in the United States as part of the general “immigrant religious experience.”</p>
<p><br />Articulating this narrative helped earlier generations of immigrants and marginalized religious and racial groups to prove their loyalties when they were suspected of having uncivilized mores or Communist sympathies, but it also perpetuated the fiction that “white” Americans (whoever is included in that category at any particular period of time) have experienced upward mobility because of their own efforts in a meritocracy, rather than because of the social capital connected to whiteness in the United States and the government-funded welfare programs (e.g., Social Security and the G.I. Bill) that largely benefited white Americans.</p>
<p>Rauf did not personally hold to the racist beliefs this older exceptionalist narrative perpetuates, nor did he even recognize that it perpetuates them. Still, he began to tell a somewhat different story after the Cordoba House controversy, in part because the controversy coincided with a recession so severe it made painfully apparent many of the economic and racial inequalities built into neoliberal free-market capitalism in the United States.</p>
<div class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb094bea91970d photo-full " id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb094bea91970d" style="float: left; margin: 15px 25px 10px 0px; width: 200px;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://sup.org/books/title/?id=23704"><img alt="Making Moderate Islam" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb094bea91970d img-responsive" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01bb094bea91970d-800wi" title="Making Moderate Islam" /></a>
<div class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb094bea91970d" id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb094bea91970d"><span style="color: #b9b9b9;"><a href="http://sup.org/books/title/?id=23704"><em>Making Moderate Islam</em> »</a>&#0160;is the first investigation of the assumptions behind moderate Islam in the United States.</span></div>
</div>
<p>Other aspects of Rauf’s work also changed after that, including his public emphasis on combatting Muslim-led terrorism with Sufism, a body of tradition that involves not just the five daily prayers and other required Islamic practices but additional formal reflection and observance (<em>dhikr</em>). The idea that Sufism is the opposite of dogmatic (some would say “fundamentalist”) Islam is as old as the idea that the United States is a true meritocracy—that is to say, it is relatively recent. Both popular and newly politicized for domestic and international purposes, this discourse of Sufi moderation is also one with orientalist roots and racial ramifications that were unapparent to Rauf when he echoed it.</p>
<p>In the years since 9/11, both scholars and activists have questioned the pressure on Muslim Americans to prove their moderation, particularly the demand—perhaps most recently <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPs7hg2VS-A&amp;feature=youtu.be&amp;t=179">revisited in the second presidential debate of the 2016 election cycle</a>—that Muslim Americans act as liaisons between the US government and Muslim communities in other locations. Today critique abounds around the usefulness of the “moderate” label and the politics behind it, but these critiques focus mainly on foreign policy issues rather than on the domestic ones discussed here. Examining Rauf’s model of moderate Islam and the assumptions that underpin it lays bare the power dynamics in which Muslim Americans are caught at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Moreover, it calls into question the larger limits of liberal inclusion for religious and racial minorities in the United States and the nation’s longer history of extending provisional tolerance under the guise of “acceptance.”</p>
<p class="following-excerpt">This post has been adapted from Rosemary R. Corbett’s <a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=23704"><em>Making Moderate Islam</em></a>.</p>
<p class="author-bio">Rosemary R. Corbett is Visiting Professor at the Bard Prison Initiative and author of <a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=23704"><em>Making Moderate Islam: Sufism, Service, and the “Ground Zero Mosque” Controversy</em></a>.</p>PoliticsReligious StudiesStanford University Press2016-11-03T08:30:00-07:00The Mission of Medinahttp://stanfordpress.typepad.com/blog/2016/11/the-mission-of-medina.html
How Saudi religious education has dynamically expanded the influence of Wahhabism.<p class="blog-tagline">How Saudi religious education has dynamically expanded the influence of Wahhabism.</p>
<p class="author-byline">by MICHAEL FARQUHAR</p>
<div id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb094e736c970d" class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb094e736c970d photo-full " style="display: inline-block;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01bb094e736c970d-pi"><img class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb094e736c970d image-full img-responsive" title="Medina" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01bb094e736c970d-800wi" alt="Medina" border="0" /></a>
<div id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb094e736c970d" class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb094e736c970d"><span style="color: #b9b9b9;">Congregants at the Mosque of the Prophet in Medina, 2009. Photo by Omar Chatriwala. CC BY 2.0 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Masjid_an-Nabawi#/media/File:The_Enlightened_City.jpg">via Wikipedia</a>. </span></div>
</div>
<p>In the last decades of the twentieth century, many Muslim communities around the world witnessed the growing influence of Salafism, a style of Islamic religiosity characterized by a distinctive set of creedal and legal principles which are understood by its adherents to reflect the beliefs and practices of the earliest generations of Muslims. The rise of Salafism, with its perceived rigidity, antimodernism and exclusivism, has been the cause of considerable anxiety on the part of Muslim and non-Muslim observers alike.</p>
<p class="pull-quote">What exactly is the “export version of Wahhabism” and through what channels has it been disseminated to the wider world in recent decades?</p>
<p>Seen as an alien intrusion in many of the communities within which it has gained a foothold, it has come to be associated in the popular imagination with atavistic brutality, misogyny, sectarianism, anti-Semitism and political violence. In the clamor to understand the nature of this phenomenon and to explain how it has achieved such seemingly unprecedented momentum, it has become common to invoke a form of cultural imperialism emanating from Saudi Arabia. <a href="http://www.france24.com/en/20120929-how-saudi-arabia-petrodollars-finance-salafist-winter-islamism-wahhabism-egypt">A 2012 article from France 24</a>, quoting an expert on the region as explaining that Salafism is an “export version of Wahhabism” and that “the Saudis have been financing [Wahhabism] around the world,” is emblematic of this line of thinking. Elsewhere, Saudi religious sway has similarly been identified as a source of social conflict across the Global South, from Indonesia to Kashmir. Meanwhile, alleged creeping Wahhabism in Muslim communities in Europe and the United States has time and again been condemned as “<a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/article/1726">a Saudi export we could do without</a>.”</p>
<p>On the face of it, efforts to explain the worldwide rise of Salafism in these terms, as the product of an extension of Wahhabi influence made possible by Saudi oil money, appear to offer an appealingly neat and compelling narrative. Yet on closer inspection, this narrative raises as many questions as it initially seems to answer. What exactly is the “export version of Wahhabism” and through what channels has it been disseminated to the wider world in recent decades?</p>
<p></p>
<p>Wahhabism can be understood as a sub-tradition of Salafism, which in turn is itself a sub-tradition of Islam. Where the overarching Islamic tradition is lent coherence by such broad elements as belief in the oneness of God and the mobilization of arguments legitimated with reference to the Qur’an, the Salafi tradition is further distinguished by a more specific overlapping set of methodological principles, texts and practices. These include an emphasis on emulating the beliefs and praxis of the early Muslim community, the “pious ancestors” (<em>Salaf al-Salih</em>), and a particular commitment to rooting out illegitimate innovations (<em>bida‘</em>) understood to have corrupted Muslims’ engagement with their religion over the course of history. Operating within this framework, Wahhabism affords particular importance to the works of the eighteenth-century reformer Muhammad bin ‘Abd al-Wahhab and a line of scholars from the Arabian Peninsula influenced by his writings.</p>
<p class="large-quote">Wahhabism can be understood as a sub-tradition of Salafism, which in turn is itself a sub-tradition of Islam.</p>
<p><br>Education has served as a tool for promoting Wahhabism ever since the inception of Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s revivalist mission in the central Arabian region of Najd in the eighteenth century. However, this project underwent a pivotal transformation in the 1920s, with the assembling of a bureaucratized education system directly funded and administered by the Saudi state. As part of ongoing processes of state- and nation-building from that time onwards, material investment in this apparatus was employed as a means for systematically advancing Wahhabi influence across and ultimately beyond the Arabian Peninsula.</p>
<p>Within this new framework, certain state-funded Islamic educational institutions founded in Saudi Arabia in the twentieth century came to sit at the heart of cross-border circuits of students and scholars from all over the world. Migrants have for centuries traveled long distances in order to perform the hajj and to teach and undertake religious studies in the holy cities of the Hijaz, on what is now the western seaboard of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Building on that legacy, the Islamic University of Medina (IUM), was launched by the Saudi state in 1961 as an explicitly missionary venture. Since that time, the IUM has been distinguished from the kingdom’s other Islamic universities by its goal of offering fully funded religious instruction primarily to young, non-Saudi men, who from the start made up over 80 percent of its student body. The expectation was that, after graduation, they would return to their communities of origin or travel on elsewhere as <em>du‘āt</em>, or missionaries.</p>
<p>By 2001, nearly 11,600 non-Saudi students, hailing from virtually every country around the world, had secured undergraduate qualifications from the IUM, and a decade later its president declared that the university could boast over 30,000 graduates. Many of these alumni have become prominent religious figureheads in locations across the globe. A missionary project on this scale has been made possible by substantial state funding. (Rough calculations based on data published by the IUM itself suggest that even by the late 1990s, the university’s total running costs since the time of its founding had racked up to an amount equivalent to over 1,400 million US dollars at today’s exchange rates).</p>
<p class="large-quote">State-funded Islamic educational institutions founded in Saudi Arabia in the twentieth century came to sit at the heart of cross-border circuits of students and scholars from all over the world</p>
<p><br>And yet the economic metaphor of common parlance—that Wahhabism is “exported” by the Saudi state—fails to capture the nuances of the picture. It suggests the straightforward transposition of a pristine set of ideas and practices from one location to another, distracting attention from the complexity at stake in the ways in which projects like the IUM came into being and also in the ways in which audiences—in this case, migrant students—have engaged with them.</p>
<p>It is certainly true that the missionary project institutionalized in the IUM may legitimately be described as Wahhabi, insofar as it was from the start managed by figures from the heart of the Wahhabi establishment and in that its syllabuses have long been rooted in principles in keeping with the Wahhabi tradition. However, in the face of a shortage of qualified Saudis in the early decades of the university’s existence, staff were recruited from across the Middle East and beyond. They included people with links to Islamist movements like the Egyptian Muslim Brothers and the Pakistani Jamaat-i Islami, and Salafi movements including the Egyptian Ansar al-Sunna al-Muhammadiyya and the South Asian Ahl-i Hadith.</p>
<p>It is also important to allow for the fact that students from a diversity of social and religious backgrounds have arrived at the IUM not merely as vectors of religious doctrine, but as creative agents with their own values, interests, and ambitions. The articulation of this range of actors into the IUM’s missionary project over time had the effect of transforming it into something quite unlike the traditional, relatively parochial Wahhabi study circles of Najd in the preceding period. If one were to reach for a metaphor to describe what is going on here, the idea of expansion would be more apt than that of export—this metaphor makes room for the fact that hegemonic expansion of the Wahhabi mission is a complex and multivalent process.</p>
<div id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb094e717b970d" class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb094e717b970d photo-full " style="float: left; margin: 15px 25px 10px 0px; width: 199px;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=25998"><img class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb094e717b970d img-responsive" title="Circuits of Faith" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01bb094e717b970d-800wi" alt="Circuits of Faith" border="0" /></a>
<div id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb094e717b970d" class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb094e717b970d"><span style="color: #b9b9b9;"><a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=25998"><em>Circuits of Faith</em> »</a> considers the efforts undertaken by Saudi actors and institutions to exert religious influence far beyond the kingdom's borders.</span></div>
</div>
<p>Moreover, what emerges from studying the history of projects like the IUM with an eye to such dynamics is not a realist picture of a unitary state seamlessly extending its power outwards over an ever-increasing array of actors, according to some coherent grand design reflective of national interests. But neither is it a case of religious ideas and practices simply diffusing across borders through grassroots circulations of migrants and texts, at a remove from questions of state power.</p>
<p>Rather, in order to understand the nature of the IUM project, of Saudi state-funded religious mission writ large, it is necessary to forge a path between these two opposing styles of analysis. Non-state actors, including non-Saudi IUM graduates, have also had a certain amount of room for maneuver, in some instances even using resources acquired within these government-backed educational networks as foundations for vocal criticism of the Saudi state itself. By injecting new reserves of capital into a transnational religious economy, Saudi state actors have been able to exert influence within the territories of other states around the world, this is true; but, contrary to popular perception, that influence has not necessarily constituted control.</p>
<p class="following-excerpt">This post has been adapted from <a href="http://sup.org/books/title/?id=25998"><em>Circuits of Faith</em></a> by Michael Farquhar.</p>
<p class="author-bio">Michael Farquhar is Lecturer in Middle East Politics at King’s College London and author of <a href="http://sup.org/books/title/?id=25998"><em>Circuits of Faith: Migration, Education, and the Wahhabi Mission</em></a>.</p>Middle East StudiesReligious StudiesStanford University Press2016-11-02T11:52:09-07:00Reason in the Holy Writhttp://stanfordpress.typepad.com/blog/2016/11/reason-in-the-holy-writ.html
How the Qur'an heralded a quest for knowledge and rational inquiry in Arabia.<p class="blog-tagline">How the Qur&#39;an heralded a quest for knowledge and rational inquiry in Arabia.</p>
<p class="author-byline">by SARI NUSSEIBEH</p>
<div class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c895539b970b photo-full " id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c895539b970b" style="display: inline-block;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c895539b970b-pi"><img alt="Qu&#39;ran" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c895539b970b image-full img-responsive" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c895539b970b-800wi" title="Qu&#39;ran" /></a>
<div class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c895539b970b" id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c895539b970b"><span style="color: #b9b9b9;">Public domain.</span></div>
</div>
<p>By any measure, the changes that gripped Arabia and its surroundings in the seventh century CE are extraordinary. The major players of the day—the Roman, Byzantine, and Sassanid Empires—set the course of history on a broad scale. Yet within a few decades an Arab world, previously regarded as a culturally insignificant backwater, catapulted to center stage.</p>
<p>Besides constituting a major political power in its own right, the Arab world emerged as an intellectual powerhouse that energized a new phase in the history of civilization. A desert people—hardly in possession of a script for their language (much less adequate material for making use of such writing)—brought forth, as if by magic, scholars and intellectual giants who made invaluable contributions to intellectual history. A marginal language spoken by a marginal people transformed into a <em>language of power</em>—a medium bearing the most advanced scientific thought. How did this transformation occur? What sparked this intellectual revolution, the birth of reason, which ultimately produced some of the greatest minds in the history of thought and science?</p>
<p>The Arabian Desert had always provided a natural setting for those who sought meaning in the glory of nature and the infinitude of space. Prophets, poets, monks, hermits, pagan sects, and simple mystics roamed the vast expanse, seeking refuge from the chatter of their communities. It seems that here, in silence and emptiness, they could hear the heartbeat of the world, feel the majesty of the stars. They came to the desert in order to reflect; worshippers sought seclusion and refuge in the caves dotting the cliffs of rugged mountains; lonesome travelers devised their first poetic rhymes following the soft, rhythmic beats of camels treading along the undulating sands; from this soil, the nest lyric of Arabic literary tradition would grow.</p>
<p class="pull-quote">It may seem surprising to find mention of poetry at the beginning of a story about reason. Yet poetry is key.</p>
<p>It may seem surprising to find mention of poetry at the beginning of a story about reason. Yet poetry is key. Affirming the priority of poetry in social and intellectual evolution is not a new idea (as seen in the writings of the Muslim philosopher, Alfarabi, who followed Aristotelian tradition on this point). But poetry is far more than just a footstep on the ladder of intellect. As the natural and immediate medium of creativity and imagination, poetry is a progenitor of reason. Breaking free from elementary locutionary forms, it evokes a world invisible to the untrained eye yet immanent to the event or object described. Such transcendence through imagination—breaking loose from the confines of immediacy and concrete reality—is nothing if not an act of freedom. Approaching these newly revealed horizons of sense, reason grows bold, makes exploratory steps, and begins to search for order as yet undiscerned. Beginning to stir, over time, it comes to make fuller and better sense of what poetry has described. But even as it does so, consciously or otherwise, imagination remains its creative spark. One can easily see how, in this light, poetry and reason form a natural pair. Without the one, the life of the other cannot be sustained.</p>
<p>The eleventh-century philosopher Avicenna identified imagination as the medium of reason. As we will see, he was not alone in giving credit—and then free reign—to the imaginative faculty both as a source and then as a “trans-rational” medium for the cognition of reality. An entire tradition of mysticism and imaginative discourse—often expressed in poetic and allegorical form—pre-existed him and flourished after his death. Just as importantly, imagination was the power source for advances on various intellectual and scientific fronts—including philosophy, law, the sciences, mathematics, and astronomy.</p>
<p>There is, however, another side to the matter. After having been sparked and then flourishing, reason may grow rigid and ossified—and even turn against its (unacknowledged) sire. Adherents may come to view it as both self-generating and self-sufficient—indeed, as the antithesis of the imagination. Imagination, however self-consciously expressed, whether in poetry or in new and unconventional ideas, then comes to count as the enemy of the rational establishment and the authoritative system of thought. It comes to represent potential danger and a threat to order and stability. One wonders whether this—the sparks thrown by imagination and their subsequent extinction—underlies the (mis)adventures of reason in Islam: on the one hand, boundless expansion, and, on the other, restrictive authoritarianism.</p>
<p>To this day, Muhammad’s sacred text exercises power because it counts as a “once-in-a-lifetime” miracle of Arabic poetic prose. Though the power of poetic imagination had long attuned the desert mind to the power of the word, created the framework for human thought and action, and prepared the cultural grounds for what would follow—nothing could compare with the upheaval that occurred in the wake of Islam’s message as expressed in the Qur’an. It manifested a linguistically commanding form hitherto unseen and unheard; it elevated the spirit to unparalleled heights; its sparks fired scholars to consider its full implications: reason in Islam was born.</p>
<p class="large-quote">The divine poetry fueled imaginations already fired by the mystery of the world, and fanned them even more.</p>
<p><br />Murmurs of doubt notwithstanding, the verses Muhammad shared about the nature of God could now be thought about and discussed in earnest among his companions and followers. The divine poetry fueled imaginations already fired by the mystery of the world, and fanned them even more. Beholding their awe-inspiring surroundings, the desert dwellers were now prompted to consider all that they saw as signs, or keys, for unlocking the secret behind them—a sovereign order holding all things together. Other verses also unsettled standing convictions about natural phenomena, what even counts as natural in the first place: “Behold ye the mountains, that thou believest are frozen, but verily they pass along like the clouds.” Could such massive structures really move, just like fleeting puffs of air? The idea defied common wisdom, shaking the trustworthiness of sensory perception. This, in turn, implied the need to change other inherited beliefs and ways of viewing the world.</p>
<p>Then as now, Qur’anic verses fed the imagination, raising questions and offering a glimpse of what links the finite and the infinite, the transitory and the eternal, appearance and reality. The verses oscillated with the precision of a pendulum, moving between the metaphysical and the psychological, the ethereal and the stuff of daily life. One can imagine how the rhythmical words opened an entire world, disclosing an infinite horizon of wonder and speculation while pointing to the architecture of the cosmos. Now, the inhabitants of the desert had, in their own language, a treasure house of declarations about God and themselves—challenging both intellect and imagination, inviting further reflection and interpretation.</p>
<p>The Arabs had been outsiders to such controversies and disputations, strangers to a conflict that didn’t quite seem to concern them. Now, they were no longer mere listeners or onlookers at an unfathomable discourse about the mysteries of the universe—how the skies and the earth are held together, how day gives way to night, and night to day, how the uncertain future yields the immutable past, how life and death each prevail in turn.</p>
<div class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d21f28d8970c photo-full " id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d21f28d8970c" style="float: left; margin: 15px 25px 10px 0px; width: 199px;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://sup.org/books/title/?id=23071"><img alt="The Story of Reason in Islam" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d21f28d8970c img-responsive" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d21f28d8970c-800wi" title="The Story of Reason in Islam" /></a>
<div class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d21f28d8970c" id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d21f28d8970c"><span style="color: #b9b9b9;"><a href="http://sup.org/books/title/?id=23071"><em> The Story of Reason in Islam</em> » </a>narrates the quest for knowledge inspired by the Qur&#39;an and its language.</span></div>
</div>
<p>Nor did they feel like outsiders to the discourse that presented these mysteries and the manifold phenomena of nature in a unified theory. The news did not come from some extraordinary figure whose origin was itself an enigma, but from an ordinary man who belonged among them—someone who didn’t pretend to be more than a messenger, the medium through whom the singular truth about existence and the universe had been revealed. In other words, spectators and outsiders now possessed the means to become participants. They had the material in their hands, and a language, too. More than anything else, this is what sparked the birth of reason in the Arabic-speaking world.</p>
<p>Even though a Qur’anic verse warns that their words lead astray, Arabian poets continued to cast a spell on their fellow inhabitants of the desert. Language—both as an artful craft and as a stimulant for the imagination—maintained its role as a medium of sovereignty and individual freedom. At the same time that the Qur’an dispossessed poets of the throne of <em>meaning</em>, it coronated a new voice declaring the wonders of the beyond. Lyrical expression yielded to discourse about the mysteries of the world and the models for human life articulated in holy writ.</p>
<p>In turn, scholars would follow this rationalist inclination, delving deep into the text of the Qur’an to sound its intellectual depths. Soon, the brazen free-spiritedness of the more outspoken poets would founder on the cliffs of the new religion that was in the course of emerging. At yet another level, others of a mystical bent would attempt to break the bonds of language altogether, considering it too constricting, and seek insight into higher realms. But common to all of these endeavors was the soul’s inner yearning to be free, the search for the medium in which liberty might find expression. Eventually, all these different orientations would compete to announce the truth of what was stirring in the desert sands.</p>
<p class="following-excerpt">This post was adapted from Sari Nusseibeh’s <em><a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=23071">The Story of Reason in Islam</a></em>.</p>
<p class="author-bio">Sari Nusseibeh is Professor of Philsophy at Al-Quds University in Jerusalem and author of <em><a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=23071">The Story of Reason in Islam</a></em>.</p>HistoryMiddle East StudiesReligious StudiesStanford University Press2016-11-01T08:30:00-07:00Searching for Social Changehttp://stanfordpress.typepad.com/blog/2016/10/decades-after-the-truth-and-reconciliation-process-south-africans-are-still-seeking-justice-by-rita-kesselring-elsie-gi.html
Decades after the truth and reconciliation process, South Africans are still seeking justice.<p class="blog-tagline">Decades after the truth and reconciliation process, South Africans are still seeking justice.</p>
<p class="author-byline">by RITA KESSELRING</p>
<div class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb094b80c5970d photo-full " id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb094b80c5970d" style="display: inline-block;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01bb094b80c5970d-pi"><img alt="Elsie Gishi" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb094b80c5970d image-full img-responsive" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01bb094b80c5970d-800wi" title="Elsie Gishi" /></a>
<div class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb094b80c5970d" id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb094b80c5970d"><span style="color: #b9b9b9;">Elsie Gishi, a claimant in the apartheid litigation who <a href="http://sabctrc.saha.org.za/reports/volume6/section2/chapter4/subsection2.htm">provided testimony</a> to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Photo by Rita Kesselring.</span></div>
</div>
<p>&#0160;</p>
<p>Twenty years ago the first public hearing of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa was heard and tomorrow marks eighteen years since the handing over of that commission’s findings to President Nelson Mandela. The Truth Commission, which has since been replicated in dozens of other countries, was an integral component of South Africa’s post-apartheid transition to what many hoped would be a more open, freer society. Now, two decades after its founding, a whole generation of young people has grown up in South Africa since this first hearing, and the commission has become a part of the new nation’s founding myth but South African officials rarely stop to ponder its success and limitations. If apartheid is mentioned in speeches today, it merely serves to provide reasons for problems the government has not been able to solve. Preoccupied with the present, with party-political scheming, elections, and scandals like the one surrounding renovations to President Zuma’s private home (<a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-35943941">financed with taxpayer money</a>), the African National Congress—a former liberation movement and now the incumbent ruling party at the national level—is slowly losing its grip on its electorate.</p>
<p class="pull-quote">The apartheid past lingers on in today’s South Africa.</p>
<p>While the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was intended to be a powerful tool for restorative justice, the apartheid past lingers on in today’s South Africa. The notion of “the past in the present” suddenly pops up everywhere—a fairly new, but pervasive, feature in public discourse. The recent rise of South African students—from privileged universities like the University of Cape Town to the underfunded University of Limpopo in Polokwane—exemplifies this new cry for justice. Increases in tuition fees sparked student protests across the country last year (inspiring the hashtag, <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/FeesMustFall?src=hash">#FeesMustFall</a>); but the protests, <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/inpictures/2016/09/south-africa-students-fees-protests-turn-violent-160921071225187.html">still ongoing</a>, are equally directed against the non-transformation of the entire education system, the bias in the curricula, and the financial exclusion of the majority of the so-called “formally disadvantaged” groups. Students have not protested so loudly and decidedly since the 1976 Soweto uprising. Indeed, this and other apartheid-era protests against minority rule are today drawn on as models for current protests.</p>
<p>&#0160;</p>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">No retreat. No surrender. We are coming for free, decolonized, quality education. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/FeesMustFall?src=hash">#FeesMustFall</a> <a href="https://t.co/6tD4Vd9L8G">pic.twitter.com/6tD4Vd9L8G</a></p>
— Wits SRC (@WitsSRC) <a href="https://twitter.com/WitsSRC/status/778691798004666368">September 21, 2016</a></blockquote>
<script src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>
</div>
<p><br />For the older generation, which was directly affected by apartheid and involved in the struggle against it, the impression that nothing much has changed since the formal ending of apartheid in 1994 is not new. Being disadvantaged, excluded from access to opportunities, land, and employment is a daily experience for many South Africans. Apart from a small group who managed to jump onto opportunities produced through individually targeted measures to correct the past (such as the Black Economic Empowerment program, which introduced a more diverse ownership scheme for large companies), the majority of South Africans have not had the chance to shape or direct their life trajectories. On the contrary, thanks to a neoliberal economic system that uncritically embraces the market economy, many inequalities have become further entrenched. South Africans are faced with a situation where the state (and the international community, for that matter) does not offer much in the way of transformation or upward mobility.</p>
<p>How can those who suffered the most during apartheid, the victims, emancipate themselves from past experiences of violence in this sobering socio-political and economic environment? The past was addressed formally and spectacularly with the internationally acclaimed TRC, but for most victims it turned out to be more of a symbolic exercise than a genuinely transformative endeavour.</p>
<p>How do elderly, injured, and struggle-tested women and men make themselves heard? In terms of the law as a means to address—and possibly resolve—past conflicts and atrocities, the post-TRC story is unfortunately quickly told. The TRC submitted some 500 cases to the government for further investigation and possible prosecution. Up to today, only a handful of cases have been prosecuted. Over the past ten years, only one case (against four former apartheid police officers who abducted, tortured, and killed Nokuthula Simelane, a guerrilla fighter with the armed wing of the ANC) has been argued—and even then, only because her family filed a case before the High Court to force the National Prosecution Authority to do its work.</p>
<p class="large-quote">How can those who suffered the most during apartheid, the victims, emancipate themselves?</p>
<p><br />In the wake of the country’s Truth and Reconciliation process, victims have been involved in a number of cases as part of the civil society umbrella group, South African Coalition for Transitional Justice. For instance, in 2005, the Ministry of Justice promulgated amendments to its policy concerning prosecutorial discretion. The changes related to the prosecution of cases “emanating from conflicts of the past”—specifically, those committed prior to May 1994 (that is, prior to the general elections that marked the end of apartheid). The amendments suggested that perpetrators could apply to the National Directorate of Public Prosecutions for “indemnity” from prosecution for politically motivated crimes. For President Thabo Mbeki, under whose administration many perpetrator-friendly policies passed, the prosecutorial leniency was a way to “unearth the truth” about the apartheid past. For victims, though, it was merely an indication that their government was willing to risk a re-run of the TRC’s amnesty process, in which convicted perpetrators could seek freedom from civil and criminal prosecution for past abuses. They challenged the newly lenient policy in court and won.</p>
<p>The law also proved ambivalent in relation to more prominent complaints. In 2001, the Khulumani Support Group, the main apartheid victims’ organization in South Africa, filed the so-called apartheid litigation to US courts, alleging that multinational companies aided and abetted the apartheid security forces in the perpetration of gross human rights violations. The case is still pending and has undergone an interesting journey through different courts. However, apart from <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/mar/02/general-motors-settles-apartheid-victims">a single settlement reached with General Motors</a> and some political turbulence at home, nothing has sprung from it for victims.</p>
<p>What do such large class action suits mean for victims in their everyday lives? Does the law help to bring about real social change? These questions are similarly relevant when assessing the legacy of the Truth Commission, which has been criticized by victims’ group for granting testimony to only a fraction of victims—21,000 (for a point of comparison, the Khulumani Support Group holds records for about 105,000 members). Unequal accumulation, distribution, and ownership of wealth are rampant in today’s South Africa, just like under apartheid rule. Certainly, the TRC did not have the mandate to investigate the economic dimension of apartheid; it exclusively focused on gross human rights violations. Hence, apart from the lesson that a narrow mandate of inquiry excludes most experiences of structural violence, South Africa also teaches us that the state needs to be willing (or forced—and internationally supported) to implement the recommendations of a truth commission.</p>
<div class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb094b81e9970d photo-full " id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb094b81e9970d" style="float: left; margin: 15px 25px 10px 0px; width: 202px;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01bb094b81e9970d-pi"><img alt="Bodies of Truth" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb094b81e9970d img-responsive" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01bb094b81e9970d-800wi" style="border: 1px solid #888888;" title="Bodies of Truth" /></a>
<div class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb094b81e9970d" id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb094b81e9970d"><span style="color: #b9b9b9;"><a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=24791"><em>Bodies of Truth</em> »</a>&#0160;offers an intimate account of how apartheid victims deal with the long-term effects of violence.</span></div>
</div>
<p>Most of all, parts of South African society but also the sympathizing international community tends to look the wrong way when looking for the seeds of social change. We must trace social change, not in legal victories alone, but in terms of victims’ subjective, everyday experiences of life. And we must be sensitive to the challenges that individuals face when seeking redress for past abuses. To position one’s self as an apartheid victim in a society that wants to move on, for example, presents a stumbling block for many in South Africa, in a country where the danger of “being different” is real and witchcraft accusations are one means of keeping people from breaking rank.</p>
<p>We must pay attention to practices of victims themselves who, in their daily coming together, comfort one another, open up a crèche for the children of the next generation, and draw attention to the intertwined perpetration of criminal and political crimes today. We can call it trauma; but most of all we must listen to those who, with very little support, try to go beyond what had and has been inflicted on them in a systemic and endemic manner: the degradation of their personhood. And in order to be truly transformative, these fragile efforts must be supported by state and local communities.</p>
<p>Looking at the recent student protests, we see parts of South Africa waking up and pursuing a just society—a society for which apartheid victims have always yearned and long demanded. To enable real transformation, however, the western world—particularly business and the governments regulating financial flows and commodity trade—must finally play their part in redeeming rather than cementing inequalities.</p>
<p>&#0160;</p>
<p class="start-reading"><a href="http://sup.org/books/extra/?id=24791&amp;i=Foreword.html">Start reading <em>Bodies of Truth</em> »</a></p>
<p class="author-bio">&#0160;</p>
<p class="author-bio">Rita Kesselring (<a class="ProfileHeaderCard-screennameLink u-linkComplex js-nav" href="https://twitter.com/RitaKesselring">@<span class="u-linkComplex-target">RitaKesselring</span></a>) is Senior Lecturer at the Institute for Social Anthropology at the University of Basel, Switzerland and author of <a href="http://sup.org/books/title/?id=24791"><em>Bodies of Truth: Law, Memory, and Emancipation in Post-Apartheid South Africa</em></a>.</p>
<p>&#0160;</p>AnthropologyStanford University Press2016-10-27T08:21:27-07:00History’s Economic Underpinninghttp://stanfordpress.typepad.com/blog/2016/10/historys-economic-underpinning.html
Jewish economic history—too long stigmatized—opens up surprising insights into the past, and the present too.<p class="blog-tagline">Jewish economic history—too long stigmatized—opens up surprising insights into the past, and the present too.</p>
<p class="author-byline">by ADAM TELLER</p>
<div class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d23066b3970c photo-full " id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d23066b3970c" style="display: inline-block;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d23066b3970c-pi"><img alt="Radziwiłł coins" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d23066b3970c image-full img-responsive" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d23066b3970c-800wi" title="Radziwiłł coins" /></a>
<div class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d23066b3970c" id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b8d23066b3970c"><span style="color: #b9b9b9;">Gold medal coins with the bust of Bogusław Radziwiłł.</span></div>
</div>
<p>When I began the research that would eventually lead to the publication of <a href="http://sup.org/books/title/?id=24461"><em>Money, Power, and Influence in Eighteenth-Century Lithuania</em></a>—a study of the Jews’ economic past in eastern Europe—I felt as if I was swimming against the tide in the study of Jewish history. The field I was working in, Jewish economic history, had been in the doldrums since the mid-twentieth century. The use of economic motifs in the vicious anti-Semitic propaganda that led up to the Holocaust had made it a topic that many felt too hot to handle. Moreover, the rise in popularity of first social and then cultural history had opened new vistas in understanding the complexities of Jewish non-Jewish interaction in the Diaspora that seemed to render insignificant issues of the Jews’ economic life.</p>
<p>I was convinced that this was not the case. I believed (and still do) that the study of Jewish economic life is a key field through which to examine the relations which developed between Jews and surrounding societies. This is because an integral aspect of most economic activity is that it engages the individual in a broad network of relationships and interests. The line stretching from owner of the means of production to producer, and from there to distributor (and those servicing the market), and thence to consumer, is often a very long one. It crosses and re-crosses seemingly impenetrable social barriers of class, ethnicity, religion, and gender (not to mention physical segregation where that exists), connecting those it touches in the most natural way. The study of Jewish economic history is therefore a means of understanding one of the most important mechanisms of social integration that functioned wherever Jews lived—even in societies where their integration was frowned upon.</p>
<p class="large-quote">The study of Jewish economic life is a key field through which to examine the relations which developed between Jews and surrounding societies.</p>
<p><br />My work on the roles of Jews in the economic system of the noble estates in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth bore this out most dramatically. I examined the huge estates of the very powerful Radziwiłł magnate dynasty and analyzed their economic structure using the methods of the New Institutional Historians. This group, rebelling against the high levels of abstraction used in classical economic modeling, conceives of the economic arena as a complex of social and cultural institutions. In order to understand it, they argue, it is necessary to examine not just the economic but the social and cultural forces that underpin it.</p>
<p>Their approach proved incredibly fruitful for me. Previous research on the magnate economy had dealt mostly with the owners of the means of production (the noble landowners) and the productive forces (the peasantry), leaving the markets to one side. But the economic institution in which the Jews were most heavily involved was the market, so my research focused on that, resulting in an entirely new analysis of the estate economy.</p>
<p>It soon became clear that an increasingly intense exploitation of the markets was a crucial element of the Radziwiłł administration in the eighteenth century. The incomes it brought them played a vital role in the family’s return to the peak of its power and influence after a decline in previous generations. Vital for my research was that Jews played key roles in the development of the estate marketing system, to the point of sometimes absolute dominance. More, they did so at the invitation of the Radziwiłł estate owners as a part of a conscious economic policy.</p>
<p>This economic integration led to higher forms of social integration—and even an improved social status for Jews. The Radziwiłłs, delighted with the increased revenues, gave their Jewish subjects support and backing that they were able to leverage into positions of (unofficial) power and influence in the estates. This new situation also affected Jewish society, where social status was increasingly determined by connections with the estate administration rather than the traditional values of learning and pedigree.</p>
<div class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c8a698f7970b photo-full " id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c8a698f7970b" style="float: left; margin: 15px 25px 10px 0px; width: 199px;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=24461"><img alt="Money, Power, and Influence in Eighteent-Century Lithuania" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c8a698f7970b img-responsive" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c8a698f7970b-800wi" title="Money, Power, and Influence in Eighteent-Century Lithuania" /></a>
<div class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c8a698f7970b" id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c8a698f7970b"><span style="color: #b9b9b9;"><a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=24461"><em>Money, Power, and Influence in Eighteenth-Century Lithuania</em> »</a> shows how central Jewish economic activity was to their social integration and to the success of that period’s nobility.</span></div>
</div>
<p>What’s more the Radziwill’s “Jewish policy” was not unique to them—all the magnate estates at this time used Jewish economic activity much as the Radziwiłłs did, and with similar results. The more I thought about it, the more I felt that this conclusion had broader implications for the history of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as a whole. It was exactly in this period that a small number of magnate families acquired the land, the wealth, and the power to become the dominant force in the running of the state (the so-called “oligarchy of the magnates”). Thus the magnates’ rise to power as a group in the eighteenth century must have been based, in part at least, on the roles Jews played in the economies of their estates. So, far from being a marginal phenomenon, Jewish economic activity in the service of the magnates was of quite central importance in the development of the Polish-Lithuanian state in this period.</p>
<p>Thinking even more broadly, I also concluded that there was a downside to the story of economic success I had described in the book, though it became clear only after the period I had studied. When the magnate economic system began to break down at the end of the eighteenth century, the Jews who had been so closely identified with it had nowhere to turn. As a new political, social, and economic order struggled to develop during the nineteenth century, the magnate regime was held responsible for the country’s many woes. The Jews, who were closely identified with it, took much of the blame. As a result, the nineteenth century saw the Jews pushed back to the social and economic margins of society, eventually to reach very high levels of pauperization.</p>
<p>And that, I feel, following recent economic developments, gives this story contemporary relevance. In our day, Jews are deeply identified with a capitalist economy, which also seems to be struggling with its own internal contradictions. In this identification with a dominant economic system, if in nothing else, they are in a position similar to that of their eastern European ancestors. Perhaps the eventual fate of Polish-Lithuanian Jewry, which had initially benefitted so much from the magnate economy but then suffered terribly in its collapse, has something to teach us today. At the very least, this lesson in Jewish economic history should prompt us to begin rethinking both the significance of the Jews’ connection with capitalism and the long-term value of the benefits it brings them.</p>
<p>&#0160;</p>
<p class="start-reading"><a href="http://sup.org/books/extra/?id=24461&amp;i=Introduction.html">Start reading <em>Money, Power, and Influence in Eighteenth-Century Lithuania</em> »</a></p>
<p class="author-bio">&#0160;</p>
<p class="author-bio">Adam Teller is Associate Professor of History and Judaic Studies at Brown University and author of <a href="http://sup.org/books/title/?id=24461"><em>Money, Power, and Influence in Eighteenth-Century Lithuania: The Jews on the Radziwiłł</em><em> Estates</em></a>.</p>
<p>&#0160;</p>HistoryJewish StudiesStanford University Press2016-10-26T08:30:00-07:00The Libertarian Alternativehttp://stanfordpress.typepad.com/blog/2016/10/the-libertarian-alternative.html
This unconventional election year underscores the merit of the third-party option.<p class="blog-tagline">This unconventional election year underscores the merit of the third-party option.</p>
<p class="author-byline">by NIKOLAI G. WENZEL</p>
<div class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb094a0676970d photo-full " id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb094a0676970d" style="display: inline-block;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01bb094a0676970d-pi"><img alt="Gadsden flag" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb094a0676970d image-full img-responsive" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01bb094a0676970d-800wi" title="Gadsden flag" /></a>
<div class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb094a0676970d" id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb094a0676970d"><span style="color: #b9b9b9;">A &quot;Don&#39;t Tread On Me&quot; flag at a rally in 2010. Photo by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0 <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/gageskidmore/4456052320">via Flickr</a>.</span></div>
</div>
<p>&#0160;</p>
<p>With the advent of two unpopular front-runners and the rise of third-party candidate Gary Johnson, libertarianism has factored more prominently in this presidential election than in any other cycle in recent memory. Given the nature of voters’ pronounced concerns over the economy and the credibility and efficiency of the federal government, this is not surprising. Libertarianism is not just an alternative to two unpalatable mainstream parties. Instead of tinkering with details, libertarianism squarely addresses the shortcomings of politics as usual, while also offering an opportunity to reflect on first principles and the proper role of government.</p>
<p class="large-quote">Indeed, libertarianism is not (just) about being left alone, and in the context of the 2016 election cycle it is not (just) an alternative to a tired insider or an erratic outsider.</p>
<p><br />Indeed, libertarianism is not (just) about being left alone, and in the context of the 2016 election cycle it is not (just) an alternative to a tired insider or an erratic outsider. Rather, libertarianism offers a principled approach to political life. At its core lies the “non-aggression principle,” which rejects the initiation of force against others. Based on this principle, government is limited to the protection of individual rights, and leaves the rest to markets and civil society. If the government attempts to do anything beyond protecting rights, it will—by definition—violate the rights of some to benefit others.</p>
<p>Beyond these philosophical precepts, libertarianism makes a compelling case on economic grounds, the first pillar of which is rooted in public choice theory. It is often assumed that market participants are motivated by selfishness, while political actors are driven by a desire to advance the common good. Public choice theory rejects this distinction, observing instead that the same people operate in markets and government—and both respond to incentives. As such, we cannot simply assume benevolence from government actors, but we must build institutional safeguards accordingly. Not surprisingly, public choice theory was described by one of its founders as “politics without romance.”</p>
<p class="pull-quote">Libertarianism makes a compelling case on economic grounds, the first pillar of which is rooted in public choice theory.</p>
<p>Public choice theory points out that politicians and bureaucrats will tend to favor policies with concentrated benefits and diffuse costs. This is the so-called “special-interest effect”—and here’s an example of how it works: Every American today pays about $15 a year to subsidize an inefficient domestic sugar industry. While it is not in any individual’s interest to fight for a $15 refund, the sugar industry will fight hard for the estimated $3 billion it takes, through government, from American consumers. Because the costs (shouldered by the taxpayers) are so diffuse, there’s little will to resist; meanwhile the payout to the special interest group (in this case, the sugar industry) is so hefty it creates a powerful motive to continue to lobby for the benefit. Five-sixths of US wealth transfers work in this way—namely they do not flow from wealthier to poorer Americans, but from the disorganized many to the organized few. Government thus becomes a medium to advance private preferences through public means, under a veneer of advancing the public good. In such an environment, which increasingly rewards political connections over economic activity, it is no wonder that income inequality has been increasing.</p>
<p>The second pillar of libertarianism is the Austrian school of economics, which explains that policymakers lack the knowledge to understand—let alone fix—a complex economy. Many everyday consumer products are actually quite complex. Tampering with any part of the market cycle through government intervention can have unforeseen and unintended consequences down the line. This is the Austrian school’s point: There are consequences to state interventions in the market, even in cases where the goods and markets in question seem relatively simple and straightforward. Even in the age of computers and advanced mathematical modeling, policymakers simply lack the requisite knowledge to &quot;fix&quot; markets, and usually end up breaking them.</p>
<p class="large-quote">Policymakers lack the knowledge to understand—let alone fix—a complex economy.</p>
<p><br />Take the example of a secretary of agriculture, trying to help poor children get access to milk (assume that the dairy lobby doesn’t figure in this picture!). The government puts a price cap on milk, at $2 per gallon. Dairy farmers face the same input costs and a limited sales price, so many will go out of business—leading to a shortage of milk, rather than the intended abundance of cheap milk. So perhaps the government attempts to fix the problem by putting a price cap on cattle feed… but this puts a crunch on cattle feed suppliers … and the cycle continues—as it has for healthcare, the War on Drugs, banking regulation, and so many others.</p>
<p>Government at all levels in the US today controls about half the economy. That&#39;s half the economy that is taken out of the hands of individuals, families, and small businesses—and controlled by politicians and bureaucrats who lack the knowledge to run an economy, and often the proper incentives to act in anybody&#39;s interest but their own.</p>
<div class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb0949a9af970d photo-full " id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb0949a9af970d" style="float: left; margin: 15px 25px 10px 0px; width: 199px;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01bb0949a9af970d-pi"><img alt="Selfish Libertarians and Socialist Conservatives?" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb0949a9af970d img-responsive" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01bb0949a9af970d-800wi" title="Selfish Libertarians and Socialist Conservatives?" /></a>
<div class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb0949a9af970d" id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb0949a9af970d"><span style="color: #b9b9b9;"><a href="http://sup.org/books/title/?id=24243"><em>Selfish Libertarians and Socialist Conservatives?</em> » </a>presents a lively debate over the essential questions that divide two competing political philosophies.</span></div>
</div>
<p>Alas, the story of government overreach—and libertarian opposition to it—doesn&#39;t end with economics. For example, the average American unwittingly commits three felonies a day. And about half of the prison population in the US is locked up for non-violent drug offenses that did not involve violating the property rights of others. There are many reasons for the increasing distrust between police and communities; increasing criminalization is an important factor. There are also consequences for race relations, as racial minorities and low-income Americans (often the same) disproportionately suffer from the growth of the police state.</p>
<p>The bad news is that both presidential candidates want to continue expanding the reach of government into our lives—an expansion that has been advanced by both liberals and conservatives, who claim to know more than we do about our lives, and will gladly use public means to advance private preferences. These expansions and incursions hurt ordinary Americans for the benefit of the politically well connected.</p>
<p>The good news is that there is an alternative: libertarianism. Let government return to its original functions of protecting life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Let government get out of the way of job creation and individual creativity. And let individuals flourish without violence or coercion.</p>
<p>&#0160;</p>
<p class="start-reading"><a href="http://sup.org/books/extra/?id=24243&amp;i=Introduction.html">Start reading <em>Selfish Libertarians &amp;&#0160;Socialist Conservatives?</em> »</a></p>
<p class="author-bio">&#0160;</p>
<p class="author-bio">Nathan G. Wenzel is a Research Fellow at the University of Paris Law School’s Center for Law &amp; Economics and co-author of <a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=24243"><em>Selfish Libertarians and Socialist Conservatives? The Foundations of the Libertarian-Conservative Debate</em></a>.</p>Business & EconomicsPoliticsStanford University Press2016-10-25T08:13:26-07:00The Trouble with Trumpismhttp://stanfordpress.typepad.com/blog/2016/10/the-trouble-with-trumpism.html
Liberals and libertarians cannot meaningfully counter Trump—but conservatism can.<p class="blog-tagline">Liberals and libertarians cannot meaningfully counter Trump—but conservatism can.</p>
<p class="author-byline">by NATHAN W. SCHLUETER</p>
<div class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c89ebb69970b photo-full " id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c89ebb69970b" style="display: inline-block;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c89ebb69970b-pi"><img alt="Trump at American Conservative Union" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c89ebb69970b image-full img-responsive" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c89ebb69970b-800wi" title="Trump at American Conservative Union" /></a>
<div class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c89ebb69970b" id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01b7c89ebb69970b"><span style="color: #b9b9b9;">Donald Trump speaking at the 2015 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland. Photo by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0 <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/gageskidmore/16058899353">via Flickr</a>.</span></div>
</div>
<p>The conservative movement, which is constituted by a dynamic tension between libertarians, traditionalist conservatives and neoconservatives, now faces the real threat of dissolution. Surprisingly, the cause of this threat does not come from within the movement, but from without. It is the result of an idiosyncratic version of populism called “Trumpism.” A toxic mix of reality show romanticism, resentment, cynicism and paranoia, Trumpism has deeply divided the conservative movement along a fault line that cuts across all three of its traditional divisions. Yet as George Nash points out in a recent issue of the <em>New Criterion</em>, “Trumpist Populism is defiantly challenging the fundamental tenets and perspectives of every component of the post-1945 conservative coalition.” Whether one’s primary concern is free trade, traditional marriage and the family, the protection of unborn children, or a robust foreign policy, one will not find much to cheer about in Trumpism. What is a conservative to do?</p>
<p class="pull-quote">American conservatism is not identical to&#0160;Republican Party politics, and it is in deep conflict with Trumpism.</p>
<p>It is important to understand that American conservatism is not synonymous with the conservative political movement. American conservatism is a public philosophy, a form of classical liberalism rooted in the principles of the American founding. Conservatives believe that those principles, furnished by the careful equilibrium of liberty, reason, and tradition, provide for human flourishing better than any competing public philosophy. American conservatism, therefore, is not identical to&#0160;Republican Party politics, and it is in deep conflict with Trumpism.</p>
<p>Trumpism is also in deep conflict with libertarianism, which favors free markets for labor and goods, and is deeply suspicions of nationalism in any form. But a good argument can be made that libertarianism lacks the resources to understand the true causes of Trumpism, and even tends to reinforce those causes. The reason is that Trumpism is a reaction to the over-reach of modern liberalism, which seeks to deny and suppress the natural human goods that are rooted in historical, cultural and embodied particularity. But because libertarianism shares with modern liberalism the voluntarist and universalist assumptions which undergird that denial, it cannot offer a real alternative to Trumpism.</p>
<p>Take immigration. Trump’s rise in the polls can be dated to the moment when he promised to deport all illegal aliens in the United States and make Mexico pay for a wall along the border. Trump’s demagogic promises, however, have largely been met with equally demagogic denunciations from libertarians and modern liberals: “Xenophobia! Racism!”</p>
<p>That this response largely coincides with the European migrant crisis is telling, as is the fact that Europe is facing its own form of Trumpism, largely in reaction to its handling of the migrant crisis. Both modern liberals and libertarians, for different reasons, promote open borders, and their inability to imagine any other reason for controlling immigration than irrational prejudice reveals a deep ideological blind spot. Even the soft libertarian F.A. Hayek attributes the existence of territorial boundaries to an atavistic tribalism, and looks forward to “a state of affairs in which national boundaries have ceased to be obstacles to the free movement of men.”</p>
<div class="photo-wrap photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb0941e2e6970d photo-full " id="photo-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb0941e2e6970d" style="float: left; margin: 15px 25px 10px 0px; width: 199px;"><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=24243"><img alt="Selfish Libertarians and Socialist Conservatives?" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb0941e2e6970d img-responsive" src="http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8342f027653ef01bb0941e2e6970d-800wi" title="Selfish Libertarians and Socialist Conservatives?" /></a>
<div class="photo-caption caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb0941e2e6970d" id="caption-xid-6a00d8342f027653ef01bb0941e2e6970d"><span style="color: #b9b9b9;"><a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=24243"><em>Selfish Libertarians and Socialist Conservatives?</em> »</a> presents a lively debate over the essential questions that divide two competing political philosophies.</span></div>
</div>
<p>But there is a conservative side to Hayek that is in conflict with his libertarianism. Hayek also asserts that “There probably never has existed a genuine belief in freedom, and there has certainly been no successful attempt to operate a free society, without a genuine reverence for grown institutions, for customs and habits and ‘all those securities of liberty which arise from regulation of long prescription and ancient ways.’” And it is difficult to see how this kind of reverence can be acquired and sustained independent of the identity that comes from territorial boundaries. Thus Roger Scruton points out that “Territorial loyalty … is at the root of all forms of government where law and liberty reign supreme.”</p>
<p>The kind of loyalty Scruton has in mind is not nationalism, nor is it simply derived from the consent of otherwise free and equal individuals. It is the kind of historically-funded membership that makes government by consent possible by creating a space independent of, but compatible with, tribal and creedal forms of membership. “Members of tribes see each other as family,” Scruton writes. “Members of creed communities see each other as the faithful; members of nations see each other as neighbors.” This kind of membership is a rare and fragile achievement, as contemporary world events are proving, and when it is suppressed or denied, it risks reverting back to the kind of tribal and creedal communities that make a free and decent political life impossible.</p>
<p>This tribal reaction to the abstract universalisms of modern liberalism and libertarianism is the danger of Trumpism. Conservatism, on the other hand, can provide a counter-force to Trumpism by defending the middle space between modern liberal or libertarian universalism and tribal particularism.</p>
<p class="large-quote">Conservatism can provide a counter-force to Trumpism by defending the middle space between modern liberal or libertarian universalism and tribal particularism.</p>
<p><br />The discovery and articulation of this middle space, a remarkable and surprisingly fragile achievement, is central to the classical liberalism of people like Edmund Burke and Adam Smith and to the American Founders. It requires an acknowledgment of both the limited though real goods of particular identities, including political identity, as constituent elements of human flourishing and the common good, and of the limited though real goods of the free market and free trade. And it also acknowledges that there is a tension between these two goods that cannot be resolved <em>a priori</em> and by dogmatic abstractions, but only in light of real deliberation about the common good. The antidote to Trumpism is not sarcastic ridicule and denunciation but realistic policy proposals that acknowledge the legitimacy of competing claims of justice with respect to the common good.</p>
<p>&#0160;</p>
<p class="start-reading"><a href="http://www.sup.org/books/extra/?id=24243&amp;i=Introduction.html">Start reading <em>Selfish Libertarians &amp; Socialist Conservatives?</em> »</a></p>
<p class="author-bio">&#0160;</p>
<p class="author-bio">Nathan W. Schlueter is Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Hillsdale College and co-author of <em><a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=24243">Selfish Libertarians and Socialist Conservatives? The Foundations of the Libertarian-Conservative Debate</a>.</em></p>PoliticsStanford University Press2016-10-24T08:39:00-07:00